Debt as the Backdrop to Life: What to Do About It

AVAlexander Volchek

You have just asked a question many people ask: a lot of people live in debt, so how do you live when your debts seem impossible to resolve? Again, are you talking about money or something else? Money? Certainly money. Imagine the whole world always lived in debt. Everyone, from childhood, and the subject brought positive emotions. Imagine debt creating positive emotions. That is theoretically possible. Could you play a game in which you trained yourself to experience debt positively? You could. If debt brought positive emotions, people would not see it as a problem. Why do I give this example? Because there are lives, and will be lives, in which people's causes and effects are arranged so that they will always be in debt. Their task is to relate to that calmly. There are lives in which a person will be in debt their whole life, whatever they do, whatever actions they take, whatever happens, wherever it happens. They will be in debt.

The question is: what matters, having no debt or being in a harmonious state while you have it? Which would you choose: no debt, or a harmonious state? Look, you want to choose no debt. That is precisely the mistake, because you could choose no debt and end up feeling very bad—even worse than you feel with debt. Do you understand? Where is your attention directed? Toward truly working on yourself, restoring your state, and developing as a spiritual being and as a person? Or toward solving the debt problem? You are saying it is directed toward solving the debt problem. Then what scale are you moving along? Imagine you have debts and your state is minus five hundred: you feel awful every morning. You have no debts, and your state is minus five hundred: you feel awful every morning for some other reason. You think you feel bad because of the debts. Are you sure you truly recognize the cause of your distress, your suffering, your emotional state, and your sensations?

Or is that a connection your logic has forced together? Or do you have debts because you feel bad? Imagine that connection: you feel bad, and therefore you have debts. You want to fight the debts, but I am saying that is a losing situation from the outset. Even if you overcame the debts, if they were not the cause of your feeling bad—if the relationship ran the other way—you would continue feeling bad. What should you do then? Truly investigate: why do I feel this way? Sasha, how you feel does not always follow directly from material and social events. People do not feel bad because they have a husband or wife, or because they do not. Not because they do not have a spouse, and not because they do. They do not feel bad because they have a job, or because they do not. We know that every variation, every case, exists simultaneously. Here is a simple example: fifteen years ago, did you feel better than you do now, or worse?

Better? Where did you live fifteen years ago? In Irkutsk. How old were you? Eighteen. Did you feel better at eighteen than you do now? I mean your inner emotional and mental state, your emotions, your experience of life, the feeling of life's richness, your perception of the surrounding space and other people, your ability to perceive the world. Did you feel better? Look how sharply I have shown you that you did not. At first, you said you felt better. Now you are shaking your head: “No! I remember I did not perceive the world all that much then. I did not feel it all that deeply.” Did you have a lot of debt at eighteen? Look, you do not even know whether you did, because it was not a problem you focused on. In exactly the same way, ten years from now you may not even remember whether you had debt now. You could connect your state with something else. Or in ten years, you might feel a hundred times worse and say that ten years earlier, with debts, you felt fantastic.

The question is what thermometer you use to measure your state. The problem is that people do not have a thermometer or a scale for this—not a thermometer measuring body temperature, but one measuring their emotional state. Something you could look at honestly, without deceiving yourself, to see how you actually felt in a particular situation. Why do you feel bad when you live in California rather than Irkutsk, have a wife, interesting work and a career, and a hell of a lot of free time? You live in a house with space around you, rather than in Moscow, in Lyubertsy, for example, or in some god-knows-what apartment in Irkutsk. You can choose whom to spend time with: to be around drunk people or criminals, or smart, interesting people. You have opportunities to earn money. You live in a place with a balanced climate and natural environment. Here is the ocean, here is snow, warm weather, wonderful weather, nature—and in those circumstances, you feel bad.

What accounts for that? Do you really need to sort out the debts, or something else? When you talk about sorting out debt, you do not want to get to the root, the cause of its appearance. Before even getting into that root and cause, look at what would be worth doing. It makes sense to investigate the root and cause of debt—the root and cause. Allow for the possibility that you could be in debt your whole life, that there may be an underlying cause you do not control and will not control. It is with you throughout your life. Perhaps you have not even seen what debt really is, do not even know it yet. I have not been barred in twenty countries for owing the government and everyone around me money, for example. Nobody wants to kill me over debt. There are different kinds of debt, right? I am not in prison for debt, confined somewhere. Or someone is killed over a debt, or their health is harmed because of it. These are different situations. At least look at how you feel. It clearly causes you distress.

The first thing to do—again, the first thing—is to work on the distress, not the debts. First, remove that distress. If you do not work through your own state in relation to this problem, finding the cause and a solution is practically impossible, unless life itself brings you to that solution. When you are stressed about a problem, you act with your eyes closed. You cannot make sound decisions about it. So first, work through the stress. First, learn to experience being in debt calmly. That is why I said: imagine everyone on Earth lived in debt; everyone would take it very calmly. I use an interesting example. We currently have twenty-four hours in a day. Can you imagine what would happen to most of the world's population if they were told there would be sixteen hours instead? What would happen? War. Worse: nuclear war. It would lead to nuclear war. Everyone would destroy one another. But if people were born knowing there were sixteen hours in a day rather than twenty-four, do you think it would make a difference to them?

No difference whatsoever. What difference would it make to them how many hours a day has? What difference would it make how many hours a day has? That is a problem. A problem with modern human thinking. A problem with thinking and truly understanding reality. If there happened to be eighteen hours, then there would be eighteen hours. Nothing terrible; we would go on. Not just nothing terrible—perhaps eighteen hours would be wonderful. Or perhaps forty hours would be wonderful. Modern society will make a problem out of anything. Forty hours or eighteen, there would be endless discussions. People would say too much time would drive everyone mad, or too little would leave no time to live. But in reality, in reality, if we set aside the planetary aspects, the Sun and the Moon—

the Sun and the Moon—if we set all those aspects aside, nothing would happen at all. What difference would it make? What difference? As long as you choose resolving the debt over your own state, or building a material asset over truly coming to know the world, you personally will remain lost. You personally will remain in endless distress. Endless distress. The immediate question is whether you have the strength to work through your stress and your state. Not always. Not necessarily. Not everyone can work through their own state, their stress, or something else. We were just recording videos. Here is such a simple task for all the scientists: we are recording, everyone has slept well, people are sitting in the room and start falling asleep. Well, do not sleep. Why are you sleeping now? Someone tells themselves, “I will not sleep,” and starts falling asleep anyway. What is that? A lack of understanding of the causes acting on their own system. Not understanding why the body has decided to sleep. Not controlling the process. Not controlling it. It means you are not responding appropriately to that process or perceiving it. Calmly say, “I do not understand anything about this process. I do not perceive it.”

For example, someone should say, “I do not perceive or understand what happens at night, because I cannot fall asleep at the snap of a finger.” Do you know a single person who can? I do not. People can study anything as much as they like, but they cannot do that simple thing: fall asleep at the snap of a finger and wake up at a set time without an alarm, calmly carrying out that action. So, Sasha, it is natural and normal to recognize from the outset that you may not only fail to work through the debt, but also fail to work through your state in relation to it. What then? On one hand, gradually allow for the possibility of debt. On the other, allow for the possibility that you will feel stress about this throughout your life. And third, begin observing and studying it appropriately from those positions. Gradually, that will bring life rather than deception. If you keep trying to sort out a debt—and notice, I am not talking about a debt that happened to arise and you quickly paid back, but one that is a fundamental problem in your life—

look, Sasha, debt in your life is like a natural process, like brushing your teeth. It goes along with you. In your particular life. Some people experience this; others never have. I know people who have never owed anyone anything in their lives. Never. They do not know what it is. They do not know what it means to owe someone. Notice that you do not need to have been born into or live in different families for this to happen. Take my family as an example. I have a wife. We live in the same family and seem as though we should share a perception of financial, material and social matters, dependencies, and money. But I am the one who earns money in our family. She has not worked or earned money for fifteen years. If I have a debt, does she experience it? My wife does not experience that debt. If she owed someone something, would I experience it? In this situation, most likely I would.

For some reason, her human system does not experience it. She has that ability. You have the ability to remain in a state of debt all the time; she has the ability not to be in it or feel debts at all. Does your wife feel the debts? Mine does not. I am not saying I am in debt, but if any element of debt appeared now, she would not feel it, experience it, or let it pass through her. Not at all, Sasha. She would not let it pass through her at all. Here is another example. We have four children, and my wife and I are fairly calm about what education they will receive. Our attitudes differ, but we do not express that worry outwardly. We do not express it. Some people have one child—not four, one—and worry enormously about the child's higher education or where the child will work. My wife, though, worries enormously—enormously—about the children getting into bad, negative situations. For her, that is absolute horror.

Starting to use drugs, for example. That fills her with a horror that definitely works differently from how it works in me. I know people who are generally indifferent to their children's health. They have not called them in ten or fifteen years. They do not know where the person is. It does not interest or matter to them. I use this to illuminate how very different forms of perception exist. Sasha, those forms also depend on time. This way of approaching the question will not satisfy you. Why? Because, from within a bad state, you firmly believe this is what causes that state. You need to look for the cause of feeling bad and allow for the possibility, Sasha, of having various problems in life while feeling endless love for the world, yourself and the people around you, without negative feelings.