Want to Leave Everything Behind and Start from Scratch? What Will Really Change?

AVAlexander Volchek

Our topic is the desire to drop everything and leave. How do you distinguish a real impulse from running away? Someone wants to leave, radically change their life, close a business, end a relationship, move to another country, change careers, or cut ties—any drastic decision. How can they tell whether it is a genuine inner impulse, a stage of life, or an escape from an unresolved inner state? The interesting thing is how people frame the question: “I have a problem. How do I decide?” Imagine someone saying, “I am conscious; I take a conscious approach. I want to observe what is happening and decide whether I genuinely see that I should not be doing this, or whether I want to run away.” There is a remarkable problem with that whole situation. A conscious approach tells us that these categories do not exist: changing your life, running away, whether something is happening correctly or incorrectly, whether it comes from an unresolved state or is truly necessary. What if it is necessary because of your unresolved state? What if you need to move precisely because you are in a strange state you have not worked through?

Let me give an example. As always, today's subject is difficult to grasp. A man and woman live together and have a conflict. One has lived with the other as an integral part of their life, unable to imagine life without them. For the other, it has been a form of amusement, like having a piece of furniture. That is how they have lived. Then they realize the relationship is not right and they cannot stay together. What is the right thing to do? As you examine the situation, you see the problems in how this family began. What was it built on? From the beginning and throughout the family's development, these people acted out of particular psychophysical problems. As we come to understand that picture and discuss whether it can be resolved well, badly, or some other way, something remarkable emerges: if they had been developed from the outset, related to one another humanely, and seen the whole picture, that marriage would never have existed.

It is not that the marriage would have been different; it would not have existed. Neither would the relationship. The same goes for those business partnerships or agreements people make with each other. They would not have existed. Why? Because causes and effects brought those people together. They did not come together because they wanted to. Most men and women who come together for a long period—I am not talking about a week—do so through deep karmic causes and effects. Those causes and effects concern not just the two people, but the circumstances of their lives. Could it have been different? Yes. It always seems it could have been cleaner and better, just as it could have been far more difficult. People kill each other. Returning to our topic of dropping everything and leaving, we need to understand what is really happening in such a situation, its essence, and whether it needs to happen at all. Should these people divorce?

Should the divorce happen because it has to happen, or because someone needs to live through something? That line of reasoning is absurdly abstract. It is social, intellectual reasoning, not a harmonious understanding of causes and effects. In life, your control over what happens and what needs to happen is very limited. Whether you experience grief with a divorce or without one, what difference does it make if you experience the same grief, the same state, the same fear? It is like fearing for your finances with or without money. What difference does it make? Someone will say, “It is better with money. There are plenty of advantages.” Again, we are talking about the presence of fear about money. If you wake up every morning with fear tightening your chest, it will keep tightening your chest whether you have money or not. So when you ask whether you should close your business now, whether that is the right path or something you need to live through, you will live through something either way. The very approach of dividing situations according to what you need them for is fundamentally absurd.

The question itself is absurd, because everything in our lives happens for something, and at the same time everything happens simply because it happens, for no purpose. Stop endlessly dividing your life into these categories: am I making this video because I need it for something, for an experience I need to live through, or am I simply making a video? Both are true at once. It is simply part of my day and my life. I could have chosen not to make it. At the same time, I am making it for certain experiences, and I neither try nor want to understand them all. Where understanding is needed, I look into things, explore and study them. I am strongly oriented toward studying causes and effects. But I also understand that there are an enormous, effectively endless number of things whose causes and effects I cannot and will not understand. Both are present at once. This brings us to another interesting part of the question I was asked: the idea of a reset. People go on spiritual trips or retreats to make them a starting point for a new life.

What should you do when you want to change your life radically? There is no reset. What reset? Take a shower and wash yourself: a sort of reset. Take off your clothes and get new ones, even find a new family or move to another country. You remain yourself. You can change your last name, but that only resets the name. Your structure and spiritual being remain exactly as they were. Imagine a human life of fifty, a hundred, or seventy years. The spiritual being that was there at the beginning is still the same. That life ends, but the spiritual being remains. What reset? There is no reset for the spiritual being in this case. What do people want from a reset? To disappear and be created anew. Then you should remember nothing. If we are talking about resetting a person's actual life, let's consider a serious reset: erase all memory. Everything, absolutely everything. You know and remember nothing: not your children, relatives, past, or present life.

Everything. Perhaps some people in the world would say, “I am ready for that.” But let's agree immediately: having your memory erased does not mean life afterward becomes good or bad. It becomes something. Do you really need that? What kind of reset do you want? People say, “Could I have a controlled reset?” What does going on a retreat mean? A controlled reset: “Please, could the retreat get rid of this pounding in my chest in the morning, this discomfort and fear? I have this impulse: I do not like how my wife behaves. Could we meditate in such a way that she stops behaving like that? Could I reset how I feel about myself? I do not think I feel very good. I see people who feel good and want to earn billions of dollars. Could I reset—

Could I reset in the same way and get that too?” Through a reset, people want not only to remove certain characteristics but to bring new ones into their lives, in a controlled way. Again: a controlled reset. I tell everyone that if you go on a serious retreat, there are places that can shuffle your life around a little. Even then, from the standpoint of the world's spiritual development, nothing has happened. But you have no control in those places. If you could control it, you could live continuously bringing about those states. Imagine being able to control how much money is in your account. Why go on a retreat to increase or decrease your money, or change your fear? Just snap your fingers and switch off the fear. Snap your fingers and create inner silence. Tell yourself, “I will wake up calm every morning,” and wake up calm. Otherwise, it is all beyond your control. You do not know what is really happening when you begin waking up calm, or what is happening elsewhere. Someone recently asked me, “If you feel good with a particular person, does that mean you should go into business with them?

Or that you should be together?” I said, “It means nothing of the kind. It means only that you feel good with them at that moment. First, it does not mean you will feel good with them in a year. Second, work out what you mean by good.” People often visit me here and say, “What a space you have! What energy!” They look at the view, and because there is a view, the view gets all the credit for the energy. If we were in a room, someone might say, “What a lovely day, what energy!” Suppose we were enclosed in a plain white room with nothing in it except two tables. “What good energy!” Someone might even say it is because there is no furniture. We could say, “All right,” add furniture, close the windows, and remove the view. The person would still feel good and find another reason why it felt good there. The more we narrowed the circumstances and removed familiar social explanations, the more they would cling to something.

At some point, they might say to the other person, “Maybe I feel good because you are here beside me.” But with an incredibly beautiful view out of the window, people naturally say, “What energy!” Does that mean you would feel just as harmonious if you came to live with that view? To get around this, people have come up with sayings like, “Good things in small doses.” Or, “You need a little exposure to the bad to appreciate the good.” Others say, “No, you need to immerse yourself in the good to see the bad.” They do not understand that there are different causes and circumstances, entirely different for different people. Someone looks at their beautiful wife and thinks, “What a wonderful wife I have for life!” Someone else looks at their beautiful wife and thinks, “How nice it would be to find ten more just as beautiful.” Where do those states come from? That is a big question.