Why You Understand How to Live Right but Cannot Change Your Life

AVAlexander Volchek

This is a tremendous chance to save yourself. An enormous number of people lack the strength to see this, to learn about it. They simply lack the strength to do it. I certainly did not have the strength to get involved in it on my own and want to stay with it. I did not have that strength. And there was no one nearby who could awaken it. Simply acknowledging that circumstance lets you find a much calmer, more reasonable, rational way to decide what to do.

AMAlexander Mineev

At the beginning, you talked about food, about the dog and how she eats. Actually, I am quite sure she eats better than many people. Probably better than I do, I could even say.

AVAlexander Volchek

People define "good" very differently. Recently I was talking to my mother while preparing food for my dog. She asked, "What do you put in it?" I started explaining what I feed her. She is on a raw diet, with raw meat as the main part—beef or lamb, for example—and some vegetables. "What grain do you cook for her?" I make either buckwheat or quinoa. My mother said, "If our pensioners could see you"—she lives in Minsk—"they certainly would not understand." I said, "It is not only pensioners who would not understand." What does "good" mean?

AMAlexander Mineev

My question is: what if we do not feel good? Do diet, sleep, and other basic things that it seems everyone should know about affect our state? What if it is just physiology, or both of those things, or something else entirely?

AVAlexander Volchek

Obviously, an enormous number of factors affect a person's state. Here is the question: why does my dog eat healthy, very healthy food when many people cannot eat healthy food? Notice that my dog did not choose healthy food. I am sure she would happily eat all sorts of junk. But she is not given junk. She is given good-quality meat. She is in a kind of choice-without-choice situation. She chooses nothing; someone decided for her, and decided correctly. I am that kind of parent. My sister and I discussed how much attention we give to talking with our children about food. We highlight aspects of healthy and unhealthy eating and try to bring truly good food into the family. Good nutrition is not a question of drinking Coca-Cola or Coca-Cola Zero. It is knowing from the outset that it is poison. Everything is clear in advance. Knowing that a jar of Nutella contains thirty or forty percent—there is a great illustration of Nutella showing how much sugar it contains, just this big layer. Thirty or forty percent, and in some countries almost sixty or seventy. When you know that, you show it to your children. Sometimes you set limits; sometimes you help them develop a sound awareness. You explain it. Explain it.

There was a time when the laws did not require a label on the jar saying what a product was made of. Now they do. People gained the opportunity to find out and look, partly because they wanted to know. Wanted to know. In my childhood, I did not have that opportunity. Nobody told me about it. Did my parents really not know that drinking Sprite was wrong? Or that eating three kilograms of grapes in one sitting was not normal? They knew eating chips was not healthy. My own parents obviously knew many of these things. But if they knew, why did they not communicate, explain, and talk about them? Partly because they could not deal with it themselves, for example, or did not discuss or look at it in some areas. Here is the question: why does my dog, without any knowledge or explanations, immediately have a particular diet that affects her state, how she smells, how her coat looks, how she sleeps, how she feels inside, her teeth, and even the number of years she will live? All of that is affected. All of it.

It even affects the additional expenses I will have elsewhere. Why does that happen automatically? There are many aspects like this. The question is whether we have the strength, whether a person has the strength to see it. An enormous number of people lack the strength to see this, to learn about it. They simply lack the strength to do it. We are used to being told, for example, that someone has no talent. I started playing the piano at forty-two. There was a piano in the room at home where I lived with my sister. It was there our whole lives. Just standing there. Later, I think when my sister moved into that apartment, she sold it, or something like that happened. That piano stood with us our whole lives. I never opened it. Never. Now I sit and wonder: why was there no one? Someone should have been there. I certainly did not have the strength to get involved in it on my own and want to stay with it. I did not have that strength. And there was no one nearby who could awaken it. But this is very important: I did not have the strength to do it, while now that strength has arisen within me. It has nothing to do with age.

Someone will say it comes with age. Oh, come on! An enormous number of people still do not do things they could do when they have the opportunity. When I lived in Moscow, we also had a piano at home, and my two daughters played. I never opened it. What difference does it make that I have a piano here? I bought it for the children. Why did I start playing here when I did not play there? That is what matters. It is not only the effect of sleep, but having the strength to take certain actions. For example, throughout my life I have had the strength to go to bed early and get up early. Look at all the methods and theories: everywhere they say it is very beneficial to go to bed and get up early. For me, that always happened naturally, as the norm. I remember starting to get up even earlier, at five in the morning. I had got up at seven and started getting up at five. For many years now, I have been getting up at five or six. I started at five because someone said it was even healthier. But overall, I was already in a harmonious routine, as were my children, and my wife more or less was too.

Relatively speaking, but more or less. At least she also goes to bed before ten or eleven at night. I know an enormous number of people who spend their whole lives trying to establish a sleep routine. For them, it is a whole undertaking: attending countless courses, reading books, working with psychotherapists. Some want to do it—I am not even talking about those who do not—and cannot. They cannot do it. Simply cannot. Yet what is the difference? I did not even want to do it. It simply happened naturally, just as my dog did not want to eat raw meat and the right food. In fact, the breeders brought her with dog food: "Here you go, feed her this." She certainly did not ask ChatGPT, "What is the best diet for a Russian borzoi according to Russia, France, and the United States? In different countries over the past hundred years? Give me all the evidence, examples, and the last several decades." A whole lot of details. Hardly. Certainly not, to get the answer that the number one diet is one whose main component is raw meat.

It is a natural situation. It happened naturally. Why do I treat the dog this way? That is the question to ask. Why do I have this attitude toward her? When we bought the dog, there was a period when she went to the bathroom in the house, ate it all, then threw up and went to the bathroom again. An endless cycle. She did it everywhere: on carpets, on sofas, everywhere. My wife started shaking. Shaking badly. So badly that she began telling her friends and everyone around her, "You do not need dogs. This is horror. Unbelievable horror." Even now, when she remembers it—notice that the dog has not changed. She is the same dog. Some circumstances seem to have changed, or perhaps they have and perhaps they have not, but my wife's state toward the dog has changed. What does that tell us? Tomorrow, she could feel exactly the same way about the dog again. Exactly the same. My own feeling toward the dog has always been very simple and the same, whatever she does. I have always been calm, understanding that the dog is here today and might not be tomorrow, because circumstances could arise where we would have to give her up, for example.

Could those circumstances arise? They could. My mother recently said, "Oh, come on. I doubt you really think you could calmly give up the dog." I would do it very calmly. I am very glad I perceive things this way. Besides, I know the dog will die. What difference does it make how long it takes? Twelve or fifteen years, six, or five—what difference? It is one hundred percent—

One hundred percent guaranteed to happen. That does nothing to diminish my love, attachment, care, attention, actions, or anything else toward her. I simply know it will happen. That is a normal, healthy perception of what is happening, free of illusion. In the same way, Sasha, you asked whether sleep or food has an effect. You said that, from my account, the dog seems to eat better. At the very least, she eats on a very precise schedule, with food measured out on scales, and so on. What should we look at here? Stop deceiving yourself and say, "I am at a point in life where I personally cannot provide myself with proper nutrition. I do not have the strength for it. I simply do not have the strength, and I do not know what to do." Stop deceiving yourself: "No, perhaps my diet is all right after all. Everyone eats like this. I have read that my diet is mostly not bad. I feel fairly good anyway. Why should I not eat this way? What difference does it make?" Stop constructing illusions around it. Calmly acknowledge the fact, acknowledge that you cannot cope with it. That does not mean you should stop putting effort into it and working on it.

Simply acknowledging that circumstance lets you find a much calmer, more reasonable, rational way to decide what to do. Should you fight it or not? As I told you, why suffer for two years trying to quit smoking, then quit for a month and start again? You could have avoided the suffering and just kept smoking calmly. It is a very good example. Why suffer? And notice, this is interesting: some people do not agonize over smoking. They have smoked calmly, never agonized, and never encountered a circumstance telling them they should not do it. Just as other people already have the developed sense that smoking destroys health and perception, that you should not do it, and that it is a major addiction that is hard to overcome. They immediately feel aversion, an automatic stop that says: absolutely do not do this under any circumstances. Just do not. This has nothing to do with how intelligent they are or the environment or family they grew up in. It is their inner state, their strength, their understanding of whether to get drawn into that addiction.

It is inner strength. I have known people who were offered things involving addictions far more difficult than smoking. Some immediately and very clearly said no. Others immediately said yes. And some were never even offered them. Their lives unfolded in such a way that no offer ever came. They did not even have to deal with it. The most important thing here is not to deceive yourself.

AMAlexander Mineev

You put it well: look yourself in the eye, do not make excuses. For example, what should I do if I recognize that my diet, sleep routine, or cigarettes are specifically harming my health, and I can feel it in my body? As you said about people who cannot change their lifestyle in terms of sleep: they keep trying to establish it, but it does not happen naturally as it does for you. And—

AVAlexander Volchek

What should they do about it?

AMAlexander Mineev

Yes. The question is how to live at all, then.

AVAlexander Volchek

The one thing a person can do is never slip into illusion here, never deceive themselves. For example, "Maybe it is all right that I smoke." Remain constantly aware, because I think you can periodically slip into the illusion and say, "It is no big deal. Once a week is no big deal." Or that a certain sleep pattern is no big deal. Do not slip into illusion. Know it is wrong. Yes, it is happening in your life, but this arrangement is wrong. It is not real, not true. It does not mean you are bad or your life is bad. It means you understand you do not have the strength for this. Another important thing: it is your responsibility. But this is not a question of ego, do you understand? If you truly and reasonably acknowledge it, your ego will not be able to create other problems. Calmly say to yourself, "This is my responsibility, and I simply do not have the strength for it. I will keep trying, studying this question, and learning to recognize it." Keeping that area of awareness is the only thing I can recommend at the level of simple reasoning. Of course, Sasha, there is a whole range of other actions you can take to work through these situations.

What should you do? When I say a range of actions, I do not mean, "Read a book about how to quit smoking in three hundred days." That is not what I mean. I mean developing strength within yourself so that you, as a person, can perceive more and do more. Not specifically about cigarettes or sleep. Developing the strength for a truly healthy perception overall. That is what matters, and that is what to work on. It takes effort. A great deal of effort, a great deal of work. A lot of ongoing work, for which, again, you may lack the strength. It is a lot of work. People often come to me and say, "Alexander, we watched your meditation and started crying. Thank you very much." Then they disappear. But if you watched a meditation and began to cry, you might recognize, "Wait! Usually, when I sit in a chair and watch someone's meditation video, I do not cry. Here I was in a normal state, a good state even, and everything was turned upside down. That means I am in the right place, and I need to be here, regardless of my own desire to be in this place."

Yet a person cannot even stay with simple causes and consequences. Simple ones. They cannot stay grounded in ordinary social life, in simple things. Simple! What is there to say? Simple conclusions. All right, thirty years ago, it would have been hard to prove that Sprite was bad, or a certain kind of laundry detergent, or shampoo containing certain ingredients. It was difficult. There was little information and little access. Some people talked about it in newspapers or on television. On the internet, there were small search engines, you could find nothing, there was no information, and you could not figure out where anything was. But in the modern world, you can check everything. You can check a great deal. The question is: do you support this falsehood, or are you being truthful with yourself and studying yourself as a human being? What matters to you? What matters? Sasha, look: do you want to quit smoking so that your life becomes good? Then you will not quit. Many will, but generally, if you mean difficult cases, they will not. Or you can quit because, in terms of the law of the universe, smoking is a human addiction.

You can stop deceiving people to earn more money because you have read about karmic management. Or you can stop deceiving—someone says, "I cannot stop. I deceived people before, and I still do." Or you want to stop because it is against the laws of the universe, not so that everything will go well for you. That is a very powerful focus of attention. Restore your health because you are not living according to the laws of the universe and are destroying your physical body by eating terribly. Restore your sleep because it does not accord with the laws of the universe, because of what you are doing to your physical body and your soul and spiritual system. At night, an enormous process takes place in the soul and spiritual system. This does not accord with it; it violates laws and rhythms. "I will not live like this." Restore your attitude toward people and stop talking about them behind their backs, not so that you will feel better, because psychology says it is good, or because you came across a video saying that thinking well of people will double your salary, but because it is against those laws. This is a tremendous chance to save yourself. An enormous chance. And—