Meditation for Beginners: The 13 Most Popular Questions

TTTanya Tsvetkova

Thirteen stupid questions about meditation. Not my questions, I should point out.

AVAlexander Volchek

All right. Stupid questions.

TTTanya Tsvetkova

Otherwise I'll start asking and it'll be, ‘She's a blonde,’ and all that. Don't put me in a box. Can you meditate lying down? Because there are yoga teachings that say you need a straight back for the flow of energy. I'm just—

AVAlexander Volchek

I'll explain. I'll be quick: we're doing a lightning round today, thirteen questions about meditation. We'll get to the most interesting question, number thirteen. The most interesting one will definitely be the thirteenth. What I want to say is that I've heard so many stories in my life about how you must meditate only in a particular posture. I knew one man whose family had been Brahmins for a hundred generations. I said, ‘Fine, I need to meditate in a particular posture, but there's a catch: you won't be able to put me in it. I can't sit that way. I can't sit with a straight back without a chair. I just can't. My physical body won't let me.’ He said, ‘What do you mean, you can't?’ I said, ‘I can't. Go on, put me in that position.’ He couldn't. He said, ‘Oh, then we won't do that exercise. For now, do it in a chair.’ In terms of genuine attainments in true perception, I can say there are a great many layers of perception. There is a kind of vision that has nothing whatsoever to do with your posture. Yesterday we were driving at speed; I was at the wheel, and we had no roof. We hadn't lost it—we hadn't had it in the first place.

We were driving with no roof. I gave Vitalik thirty minutes of—

TTTanya Tsvetkova

Without stopping.

AVAlexander Volchek

Without stopping, I gave him that kind of clairvoyance—complete clairvoyance. It was an absolutely pure meditative process. And Vitalik, sitting next to me, entered that process and immersed himself in it. So the question is always what you want to perceive and what you want to get out of it. There are things you can't attain sitting down and things you can't attain lying down. But when it comes to genuinely expanding your perception, truly perceiving things, it honestly makes no difference. You either have that vision or you don't. The question is rather like this: imagine a child—my four-year-old son, for example—and me. Who will earn money faster: him moving around or me lying down?

TTTanya Tsvetkova

Yes.

AVAlexander Volchek

The answer's obvious: he won't earn any money at all. None. He won't even be able to get around much. Meanwhile, lying down, I'll pick up my phone and earn money perfectly well. It'll be enough for me. I can easily earn money lying down. That's a very important point. What does it tell us? If you're in a particular state of perception, entering different states—and that requires a discussion of what meditation is—

TTTanya Tsvetkova

I see.

AVAlexander Volchek

Yes, entering particular states has nothing to do with that. It's an illusion, and very often it's deception. Unfortunately, it often is. I'm certainly not dismissing the fact that some practices require particular positions. But when we're talking about true immersion, a genuine meditative state, it's fundamentally possible in entirely different spaces, systems, and body positions. ‘Can it be limited in terms of time? Is meditation five minutes, ten minutes? How does time figure into it?’ When a person sets themselves the task of meditating for at least ten or twenty minutes and measures it against time, that's not meditation. It's fitting your time to a particular task. It isn't entering a meditative state. First, you can't enter meditation by setting yourself the goal of meditating. Second, it certainly isn't tied to time; time has no bearing on it. You can sit there—some people are proud and say, ‘I'm experienced. I've sat in meditation for ten thousand hours.’ I tell them, ‘Well, I have no experience.

I haven't sat in meditation for ten thousand hours, but I can see this. Can you see it?’ They say, ‘No.’ You know what it's like? ‘I'm in business; I'm experienced. I've been in business for forty years.’ ‘Well, I've been in business for six months and made a billion dollars. How much have you made?’ ‘In forty years, I've lost everything and earned nothing.’ It's very much like that. Time, in this case, doesn't indicate quality at all. And yet, again, many things do take time and repetition. It's very important to hear that: many things take time and repetition. There are different techniques, so it makes sense to understand the subject more broadly. There are cases where a meditative state, or preparing for meditation, matters in terms of a minute or thirty seconds. Sometimes one person can do in thirty seconds what another can't do in thousands of hours. Other things take time, concentration, practice, and work. But I can tell you one thing with certainty: people are not comparable as spiritual beings.

They aren't comparable. Because people aren't comparable as spiritual beings, someone might spend sixty years in meditation to feel what another person feels every thirty minutes of their life without meditating. It's easy to make comparisons in business, isn't it? Sometimes it's easy in professional work. With families, you can compare the number of children, the square footage of houses or apartments, how expensive the furniture is, or the size of the lot. There are things you can compare. Comparing spiritual beings is a different matter. And there's also the question of what you're meditating on. If you're in the material world and say, ‘The spiritual world doesn't exist. Meditation exists in the material world, and I meditate from within it,’ then you're meditating inside that box. Someone next to you might say, ‘I know there's a spiritual world and a material world. I meditate from the spiritual world.’ A minute of that person's meditation from the spiritual world isn't comparable to meditation within the material world. Meditate all you like in the material world: you'll remain in the material world.

TTTanya Tsvetkova

Images, visions and bright light appear during meditation. What does that mean? Here is an extra question from me. You say everyone is a spiritual being. Does everyone have the capacity for vision? Clearly, not everyone has it.

AVAlexander Volchek

Look, absolutely anyone—anyone. Though, as always, there are exceptions. When I say anyone, there are exceptions. They're a small part of the overall picture; please don't assume you're one of them.

TTTanya Tsvetkova

Yes.

AVAlexander Volchek

Everyone perceives something spiritually. Everyone has flashes of vision, perceptions of ranges of color, and all the rest. Spiritual vision goes by many different names: intuition, clairvoyance, inspiration, imagination—a whole spectrum. That's not the subject of this conversation, so I won't go into it. But the important thing is that absolutely everyone perceives. The question is whether, when it happens, they understand that they've seen energy or spaces of color, or the present, future, or past. Or do they think it's just some funny thing they saw on television or somewhere else? Do they recognize that perception or not? The fundamental point is this: don't focus on identifying what you see. Focus on immersing yourself in that vision, that perception. Those are somewhat different things. Everyone immediately wants to describe, identify, and examine it. But description and identification are a separate undertaking, and not everyone may even like it. One important step in moving forward is learning to remember everything you perceive. Once you learn to remember all of it, you'll begin to distinguish what was true from what was false.

I remember someone once gave me a simple exercise, perhaps ten or twelve years ago. He said, ‘When you're traveling along a road…’ I would be sitting in the back seat with a driver; that's how I've traveled for most of my life. You constantly see cars around you on the road. I didn't like working in the car. I always liked just looking out the window, doing nothing at all. You keep seeing license plates, and sometimes you think, ‘I knew just a moment ago that I'd see that plate or that car.’ He said you have to learn to compare: did you really see that car beforehand, or did you just make that up now? Everyone has had something like that in their life: ‘Wait, didn't that just happen?’ Sometimes these things occur. You're in the car, thinking about something, and your wife says it out loud. You think, ‘Oh, I was just thinking about that.’

TTTanya Tsvetkova

Or not your wife—your husband.

AVAlexander Volchek

Here's an interesting point: perhaps you didn't pick up what she was thinking. You thought it, she picked up your thought, and she said it before you did. There are different possibilities. Learn to notice these things; start noticing them.

Start noticing them. Simply notice them, neutrally, and take them calmly. Interpreting these things is a very difficult, specialized matter. Someone asks, ‘You see colors—what is that?’ It's like asking me this: imagine we downloaded five million SKUs from Amazon and dumped them in a pile. We say, ‘We saw this. What is it?’ Except we don't know how to make sense of those SKUs. The person asks, ‘What is it?’ Well, it's five million or fifty million SKUs. Am I supposed to list them all? What might there be in these energies? I can't list it all. What did you see? You looked out a window. It's that sort of question: ‘I looked out the window and saw something. What did I see?’ I don't know where you are. Perhaps a tree, a river, a person, a hand, or a bird. I don't know what you saw.

TTTanya Tsvetkova

Yes. Next question: how is meditation different from simply relaxing? Is it the same thing? Sleep, rest, meditation—those three concepts.

AVAlexander Volchek

When we talk about relaxation, we are using the language of the material world. In this case, we are discussing meditation from the standpoint of the material world. How is meditation different from a massage? How is a massage different from working at a computer? That is roughly the same sort of question as how meditation differs from a massage. How is working at a computer different from kissing my wife?

TTTanya Tsvetkova

Mm-hmm.

AVAlexander Volchek

It's that sort of question: how is meditation different from relaxation? If you really look at it in terms of spiritual perception and spiritual spaces, it's exactly like asking how a massage differs from earning five thousand dollars. You'll say, ‘Sasha, how are they different? In every way.’

Well, how are they different—

TTTanya Tsvetkova

Both are pleasant.

AVAlexander Volchek

Look at how the question is framed. If you sit down to meditate in order to relax—or rather, if your goal is to relax—there are different ways to get there.

Sleep. Ask someone to give you a massage.

Do certain exercises yourself. Read a book, for example—

TTTanya Tsvetkova

Breathe.

AVAlexander Volchek

Listen to music, breathe, jump around, go for a walk, go to a particular place, eat a particular kind of food. Look—

There's a whole range of things. Spend time with certain kinds of people. A whole range. The aim is to relax. Does a meditative state relax you? It does, guaranteed. Just like that—you've relaxed. Now take something else: where does meditation lead? Relaxation—do you like it? Yes. Reading thoughts. Changes in consciousness. And a whole range of things beyond that. This is important: if you want to relax, do that and choose what works for you. If you want to understand and reach certain other capabilities, a massage won't help you.

TTTanya Tsvetkova

You have partly answered this already. Maybe there is something to add. How do you measure your progress in meditation? What measures success: the depth of the feeling, the number of minutes, or the effects?

AVAlexander Volchek

Of course. The answer's very simple: the number of minutes.

TTTanya Tsvetkova

That is what I thought.

AVAlexander Volchek

Four minutes, and that's it. Yes: first, the number of minutes. Second, the number of birds that flew past outside. Third, the brightness of the images. But again, if you're in the physical, material world and you meditate within it, you'll find a whole range of measures: how long you sat, how many places you sat in, how many people you sat with, and the kinds of meditation you did. Group meditation, lying down, eyes closed, eyes open, with light, without light, in darkness, meditating on a candle, on vinegar, on a greyhound. Meditation with children, without children, half lying down, half sitting up, doing push-ups, walking, wearing headphones, without headphones, with music, without music, with aggressive music.

TTTanya Tsvetkova

That is the next question, by the way.

AVAlexander Volchek

Without aggressive music, and so on. There's a whole range of measures you can invent. Go ahead, invent them. But right now you're talking about meditation within the material world.

Again: meditation within the material world. With desires rooted in the material world, can you understand how to measure the quality of meditation? Think about whether you want quality or a result. Decide that right away. Are you building a business so you can take ten million dollars out of it in four years? Or are you building one so that it must have fifteen thousand employees and you can talk to every one of them? Think about it, choose, and decide what's important to you: quality or the result. What's more, this quality is an abstraction you've invented for yourself. Or do you need an end result? ‘I've measured the quality of my meditation, yet I feel terrible. I've meditated—ten thousand steps of meditation. Then, suddenly, I'm divorced. One child died, then a second, a third, a fourth. My arm was torn off, and I fell into a coma.’ So what are we measuring?

TTTanya Tsvetkova

Can you meditate to music? Many people wonder whether music interferes or, on the contrary, helps you get into the right state.

AVAlexander Volchek

Look, from the standpoint of the material world, from the standpoint—

TTTanya Tsvetkova

Of the spiritual world.

AVAlexander Volchek

Let me explain meditation with music a little better. Can you meditate when Tanya is nearby? Can you meditate when Vasya is nearby? Can you meditate when there's a projector shining light next to you? If Tanya is there, you can meditate. Can you—

TTTanya Tsvetkova

On Tanya.

AVAlexander Volchek

Can you meditate when the computer is on? Can you meditate when the bed is turned down? Can you meditate while you are in the United States? Can you meditate while you are in Belarus? Can you meditate during the day, at night, can you meditate—

TTTanya Tsvetkova

That is one of the questions.

AVAlexander Volchek

With loud music? With quiet music? With rock music, Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Leps, or someone reciting Pushkin's poems? Look, what I'm saying is very important. Because people associate music with meditation, for some reason they bring up music. But there's a huge amount of other stuff in our lives. If someone makes music a condition, it's important to bring in a huge number of other things, too. Can you meditate with the sound of the ocean? While driving? On the road? With a cemetery across from you? In a fifteen-story building? These examples matter. The examples I gave before were silly; now I've started naming things that matter.

For example, a cemetery outside, or a fifteen-story building where you're on the second floor, and the building is wide. Can you meditate when people are drinking in the rooms next door? When you drank yesterday? When you yelled at fifteen people today? When you hit a woman today? When you stole today or lied yesterday? When you've harmed a great many people over the past ten years? When someone has harmed you? There are so many different aspects. It's a material question, an exclusively material question. The human ego sits there saying, ‘We definitely don't need to meditate properly,’ and inserts this question. Fundamentally, it doesn't matter. In reality, of course, there are limits to entering different states. If I put on headphones and play lots of music, I'll enter a limited state. In fact, I can say this about any headphones. There's a very well-known man who offers meditation by the ocean with headphones. I can tell you right away: headphones over your ears shut down your perception. Closed eyes shut down perception, while in some cases closed eyes open it up.

You can experience certain meditative processes with your eyes closed, but you block other processes. Some can only happen with your eyes open. As for music, I can tell you right away—again, I won't say never—

TTTanya Tsvetkova

The overall energy of nature.

AVAlexander Volchek

I won't say never, but I'll honestly tell you that music can't add anything to meditative states. It can't add anything. It can lead a person into certain spaces they don't need. Someone will say, ‘Sasha, you're probably talking about rock, but what about—’

TTTanya Tsvetkova

Drumming.

Sound therapy.

AVAlexander Volchek

Certain places. Some things support certain structures. I study piano myself, for example, though obviously I'm nobody compared with the great musicians who can take you into incredible states, including meditative ones. But you need to understand why you enter a state when one person plays a composition and not when another plays it. You also need to understand what state you're entering. Getting goosebumps doesn't mean something good is happening.

TTTanya Tsvetkova

That's what I—

AVAlexander Volchek

Feeling euphoria doesn't mean something good is happening. That's important. So we come to the next point: it depends on what you want to get out of meditation.

What do you want to get out of meditation? What do you want to attain? A quick death, a peaceful death? A harmonious experience of happiness, equilibrium, accelerated karma? Or do you want to relax? What do you want to attain? Choose. Do you want to expand your flow? Do you want to dampen your conscious perception involving a huge number of people? People enter all kinds of meditations, often without any control. They understand, for instance, that they have connections in the world, and a huge number of connections break down in any genuine meditative space. A huge number. The person controls that destruction. They know what's happening and are ready for it. Say they have a destructive connection, and it breaks down. But that destructive connection brings them a million dollars every month. They break it, and the million dollars disappears. You ask, ‘Are you going to break it?’ They say, ‘We'll keep that connection.

We won't break that one.’ It's the person's choice. That's the point. Offer someone that choice. I can honestly tell you I've offered people many things, and very few agree. I wasn't even asking them to do it; I was asking them the question. Nine out of ten won't even agree to it as a question, let alone in reality. They're afraid to agree even hypothetically. They realize that perhaps everything will start turning and they'll have to go through with it.

MSMixed speech · confirmed: Alexander Volchek, Tanya Tsvetkova

It will all come true, right? How much time should you meditate each day?

AVAlexander Volchek

How much time should you meditate each day?

MSMixed speech · confirmed: Alexander Volchek, Tanya Tsvetkova

Yes. Or have we already answered—

AVAlexander Volchek

Well, of course, at least fourteen and a half hours. Of those—

MSMixed speech · confirmed: Alexander Volchek, Tanya Tsvetkova

Twenty-three seconds.

AVAlexander Volchek

To start with. Of those, thirteen and a half hours lying down and thirty minutes standing up.

MSMixed speech · confirmed: Alexander Volchek, Tanya Tsvetkova

And with music.

AVAlexander Volchek

And it's very important to spend twelve and a half minutes running on a—

MSMixed speech · confirmed: Alexander Volchek, Tanya Tsvetkova

A treadmill.

AVAlexander Volchek

On all fours.

MSMixed speech · confirmed: Alexander Volchek, Tanya Tsvetkova

What time of day is best for meditation?

AVAlexander Volchek

As for choosing a time of day, it sometimes matters for certain people in certain situations. But a huge number of factors come along with the time of day. How long has it been since you slept? What smells are in the room? Who have you been talking to? What country are you in? Here we go again. Are you on the second floor of a twelve-story building? Is there a cemetery nearby? Did you go out for coffee four days ago? And so on. There are a great many circumstances. Time matters. But for someone who really wants to… All the questions in this lightning round so far have been asked from the material world. From the spiritual world, this kind of question is impossible. Here, look at the aim of the question. This is very important: meditation and the result. Notice the idea of ‘good meditation.’ Decide what you want. Good meditation or a harmonious life? Good meditation or equilibrium? Good meditation and expanded perception? Good meditation or balance in your life? Good meditation or a state in which you perceive people? Choose what you want.

You want the idea of ‘good.’

MSMixed speech · confirmed: Alexander Volchek, Tanya Tsvetkova

‘Right.’

AVAlexander Volchek

‘Right,’ ‘worthy.’ Then post on Instagram, ‘I possess the qualities of good meditation.’ Next question.

MSMixed speech · confirmed: Alexander Volchek, Tanya Tsvetkova

How do you calm the mind and switch off the flow of thoughts during meditation?

AVAlexander Volchek

How do you calm the mind and switch off—

MSMixed speech · confirmed: Alexander Volchek, Tanya Tsvetkova

And you answer differently from everyone else.

AVAlexander Volchek

How do you calm the mind and switch off what?

MSMixed speech · confirmed: Alexander Volchek, Tanya Tsvetkova

The flow of thoughts.

AVAlexander Volchek

And switch off the stream of thoughts. Genuine entry into a meditative state isn't directly connected with that question. I'll explain why. To understand the question, we need to know exactly what we want to switch off and what these thoughts are. There are true thoughts, and there's rubbish. In spiritual science, the latter is called words. Words are just words: Tanya, skirt, chair, table, girl, meat, sausage, two plus two, five, six, seven, eight. It's simply a collection of words. Very often, when people discuss things with each other, they're expressing a collection of words. If they've been drinking, for example, I guarantee that their conversation takes place in words, not thoughts. Thoughts are genuine, true information that comes to you through your soul. That's a very important point. You'll never want to switch off the true stream of thoughts. I guarantee that no one in the world will ever want to switch it off, because the true stream of thoughts is truth pouring into you. Truth. A person spends ninety-nine or a hundred percent of their time in words and barely hears it. When the true stream pours in, you experience silence at the same time. You have no need to fight it.

If you tell yourself, ‘Slow down,’ it slows down. If you say, ‘Let's go,’ it goes. More precisely, you can often say, ‘Let's go,’ and nothing happens, because the true stream is a very particular thing. So, yes, when a person enters a genuine meditative state—these states are rarely entered, and you can enter them with the intention of entering meditation—they need to move into a state without that verbal chatter and enter a stream of true transmission. That's the point of meditation. When a person enters a meditative state, they begin observing spiritual worlds. As they observe those worlds, they inevitably start perceiving a great deal, including things interpreted as words, things with a description. You asked how to describe what you see. Everything has an interpretation. Rather than fighting it, you need to learn how to interpret it. Many people who enter a particular state know exactly this: they have no words and can't interpret it. They can't generate or turn on that stream and truly receive it.

Should you fight that first state? No. Fighting the state itself is a struggle within the material world, a kind of roulette game with yourself. It won't lead anywhere. To receive a genuine spiritual stream, you need to meditate from the spiritual world. If you do, the verbal stream may remain. You might have an injury, an injured finger. Someone might be bothering you, buzzing around, or using a drill. All kinds of things could be going on. Yet a large part of your system will be connected to the spiritual world, and you'll be in a meditative state, a state of perception. You may still have some verbal rubbish, as we'll call it, or a distraction because something is bothering you somewhere. That doesn't mean you can't be in a genuine meditative state. That's the whole point. I now lead meditations on YouTube every week, on Friday and Saturday, and put them in the Live section. Someone who also attends our Life group asked me, ‘Sasha, do I need to do any other meditations besides watching these?’

I said, ‘For now, just watch these meditations and work toward a state where, in different situations throughout the day, you enter a meditative state without any desire to do so.’ What is a meditative state? It's when you begin to hear the spiritual world. You don't need a posture or time for that. You don't need to set anything aside. Of course, to learn, you have to experience it and go through it. But you don't need to set aside time for it; it works automatically. Anyone would say that. Imagine throwing a ball to a basketball player. Do they need to set aside time to learn to catch it? No, they'll catch it automatically. The reflex will kick in. Being in meditative states doesn't require time; it happens constantly. That's the point: for a person to expand their perception and remain in that meditative state.

MSMixed speech · confirmed: Alexander Volchek, Tanya Tsvetkova

Mm-hmm. How do you keep from giving up meditation?

AVAlexander Volchek

There are two factors. First, today we're going through these thirteen—or how many?—thirteen and a half questions.

Concentrate as fully as you can on what's being explained through these thirteen and a half questions. That's one part, the first solution. The second solution… I want to say that this is very difficult.

MSMixed speech · confirmed: Alexander Volchek, Tanya Tsvetkova

Not to give up.

AVAlexander Volchek

Difficult. What does ‘not giving up meditation’ mean? How do I keep from giving up perceiving the spiritual world hundreds or thousands of times throughout the day? How do I keep from giving that up? It's my life. I live in it naturally. I don't even ask myself that question.

I don't ask it. But to reach that state, for it to become harmonious—as I've said in some videos, my wife has read books to the children every evening for fourteen years. Do you think she asks herself how to keep from giving up reading? She doesn't, because there's no goal or task in it. There's a certain impulse she lives in and acts from. If you're in a state of perceiving the world, you won't feel like giving up. You'll feel that you want to perceive and see even more. The problem is that people want to enter a meditative state when they feel bad; as soon as they feel a little better, they jump out. That's one of the traps that makes people quit. A transformation happens. A window opens a crack, a breeze comes in, the transformation starts, and they already feel they need to stop. The whole world around them resists. You need to set a very strong intention and have the strength. Some people won't be able to do it in this lifetime. They won't. Certain conditions have to come together for you to watch particular people.

If you watch and engage—I'm posting many more meditations, and they're incredibly powerful, deeply transformative—engaging with them will help you expand your state until it becomes normal for you. But ‘How do I keep from giving up meditation?’ is like asking me, ‘How do I keep from giving up living?’

TTTanya Tsvetkova

Breathing.

AVAlexander Volchek

How do I keep from giving up breathing? Yes, that's what the question is like for me.

TTTanya Tsvetkova

What results does meditation bring, and how soon will I feel them? Many people want to know about the benefits: reducing stress, improving sleep, developing intuition. How long do you wait for these effects?

AVAlexander Volchek

Let's look at it again. Don't look at meditation just as meditation. Look at what you want to accomplish. If you want better sleep, list the factors that affect it. Something else might help faster than meditation: perhaps your husband snores beside you, you go to bed late, or you're stressed at work. If you want to relax your body, examine the factors involved. Maybe you shouldn't be hauling forty-kilogram sacks all day and should do something else. Examine these things. Don't approach meditation as a way to obtain simple material benefits. When someone lives from the material world, they don't understand perception of the spiritual world.

If they do not understand the perception of the spiritual world, they will see the result only when they reach it. It is like a blind person asking about the difference between red and green. They were born blind and say, “I have been blind for forty years. You keep insisting there is a difference between red and green. Explain the difference. What will happen when I start seeing? What is so special about sight?” Do you understand that it is an equivalent question? An equivalent question. The blind person says, “Explain why I need to see.” You can tell them anything, but they do not know. They cannot even come into contact with it or experience it. They do not understand what it means to see another person. They do not understand what it means to see another person.

TTTanya Tsvetkova

Are there any contraindications? Can meditation be harmful, especially for people with psychological trauma or an anxiety disorder? To quote directly: meditation can make you lose your mind.

AVAlexander Volchek

A person asks whether meditation can have a bad result. It's the same as asking whether life can have a bad effect. Can breathing have a bad effect?

TTTanya Tsvetkova

.

AVAlexander Volchek

For me, asking whether meditation can have a bad effect is like asking whether breathing can have a bad effect, whether breathing can make you lose your mind. Say I'm walking down the street and get shot, and someone tells me, ‘You were shot because you were breathing.’ Well, I was breathing and I got shot. When things happen to a person and they're told those things happened because their perception expanded, that's a very particular issue. Can expanding your perception lead to certain states—

TTTanya Tsvetkova

A worsening of your condition.

AVAlexander Volchek

A worsening of your condition? Of course it can. Just as any day can make things worse, so can getting married, meeting someone new, traveling to another country for pleasure or work, going to a store, eating, opening or closing a business, or starting a new job. Again, though, you're talking about an abstraction and treating it entirely as an ordinary physical, material action. Can playing basketball make your condition worse? Easily. You could break a leg, get hit in the head by the ball, or have a heart attack. Anything can happen anywhere. Can simply walking down the street make your condition worse? Yes. Can breathing? Of course it can.

TTTanya Tsvetkova

Unusual states and crises during meditation. Some people experience powerful emotions, tears and frightening sensations. Panic attacks.

AVAlexander Volchek

Yes. People experience—

TTTanya Tsvetkova

Should they continue?

AVAlexander Volchek

People are living their lives, and a particular event happens while they're doing some exercise. They say, ‘It's the meditation.’ I say, ‘No, you just played basketball yesterday. You just went to that job. That's simply what your husband or wife is like, or you've had a child.’ People start correlating particular periods in their lives. Imagine a person's life moving along, and they're supposed to start a family at this point. Just before it, they start meditating, and then they start a family. They tell everyone, ‘Look, I started meditating and then I started a family.’ Someone says, ‘The two aren't connected at all. You could have skipped meditation and had a family anyway. Or you started meditating because you were going to start a family later and needed to arrive at that state.’ It's an entirely ego-driven construction of the material world, meant to lead a person away from genuine perception and genuine things. I'm talking about true meditation, not meditation to relax, earn money, put the evil eye on someone, cast a love spell on someone, or make my life feel great.

That's not what I'm talking about.

TTTanya Tsvetkova

Can a Christian or a Muslim meditate? Many people over thirty from post-Soviet countries wonder whether meditation is some kind of cult or religious—

AVAlexander Volchek

That's a very interesting point, isn't it? Before this, we were talking about a state where you simply sit down to relax. In absolutely all practical teachings, there's a state in which a person reads a particular text.

There are states in which a person reads a text—for example, a prayer. Is prayer meditation? But because meditation is supposedly a term unrelated to Christianity, for instance, people see it as some occult activity that doesn't belong to it. It amazes me that people ask this and then, as Christians, read horoscopes or get frightened by a black cat crossing their path. Or someone dies, and only then do they decide to go to church and do something. They perform various rites because they're afraid something else will happen. Or they lie, steal, and deceive other people while saying meditation will cause problems. When we say a person lives in the spiritual world, imagine that within it they're connected to certain spiritual energies. If meditation means expanding your own perception, does that disrupt work with other energies? In only one way: it disrupts the work of people who want to take control of you and serve as your guides to pure worlds. I say, ‘I want to hear myself.’ They say, ‘No, stop! For you to hear yourself, I have to be present.

You have to pay money, hand it over. You have to have spent forty years in a particular initiation to hear yourself. You can't hear yourself on your own if you belong to a particular teaching or movement.’ Of course, some teachings and movements are perfectly relaxed about it. Some don't say anything about it at all. They have no problem with it.

TTTanya Tsvetkova

Yes. That is it. The thirteenth question.

AVAlexander Volchek

The thirteenth, yes.

I recommend this to everyone: as I said, I lead meditations on my YouTube channel through livestreams, usually on Friday and Saturday. There are recorded meditations, too, a great many of them, and you can watch them again. The descriptions indicate which meditations carry an incredible power of connection with yourself, and which you can watch every day. Every day, something entirely new will open up for you.