How to Find Your Purpose | The Main Mistake That Lets Life Pass You By

AVAlexander Volchek

Millions of people are searching for themselves, their work, their true self, their purpose. Underneath all of that is a feeling that somewhere there is one right goal, one great mission, one phrase you need to find—and then life will finally begin. But what if that is a trap? What if your purpose is not a profession, a dream, a single task, or an event to which you should reduce your whole life? In this episode, we will examine why searching for your purpose can become a way of not living. Does each person have an individual purpose, or do all people share one purpose? How do you find yours? Above all, how can you truly move closer to understanding your path without turning purpose into a beautiful idea, an illusion for which you put life itself on hold?

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

People are searching for their work, their true self. The classic version is searching for their purpose: “Until I find my purpose, I won't do anything else.” And that purpose has to be something grand. There is a feeling that somewhere in this arrangement a ready-made self is hidden, and you just need to find it. Does it work that way? What should you do to move closer to your true self? Does such a self even exist?

AVAlexander Volchek

Look at any search for purpose as it generally exists in the world. Let's examine the terminology. “Purpose” becomes a construct that lets a person do something other than what causes and effects have brought them. People want to find a purpose that feels harmonious to them and to their personality. There is a huge difference between that and what is actually destined for you. For example, someone may be destined to die at twenty, yet have fulfilled their purpose. Their main karmic task was to live to twenty and die. There are plenty of jokes about this. “Can you tell me my purpose?” “Yes, I'll tell you. Remember when you were twelve, in sixth grade?” “Yes.” “Remember a boy came along, you had an argument with him, and he moved to another school because of it?” “Yes, I remember doing that.” “Well, that is why you were born: to do that, because the boy's life took a different turn.”

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Yes, that relates to the idea of—

AVAlexander Volchek

And that's it. You are told that and ask, “What else?”

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

A grand idea.

AVAlexander Volchek

That's it. It has all happened already.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

A grand idea, like inventing a cure for cancer or HIV.

AVAlexander Volchek

Yes. People think of their purpose as something they will like. In today's social world, on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, some people see it as something grand, something great. That is why people at those training sessions walk on hot coals, for example: to encounter something beyond their limits. I am not against showing people that there are extremes, that their possibilities extend a little further—that they can walk on coals, for example. Someone thinks, “Oh, it turns out I can do that too.” Fine. But the emphasis is on great things. On the other hand, some people searching for their purpose say, “This was my purpose. I always wanted to be a teacher,” for example. They become a teacher. Here is the question. Yesterday I went to a concert at Iolanta's school, their final concert of the year, and a teacher was retiring. He had led the choir for forty years. It is a well-known school in the United States, in California, in Silicon Valley: Gunn High School. This teacher was retiring after forty years there. The choir is incredible. It amazes me.

The schools here in the Valley, the quality of the music, the musical development available to children in all the schools from first grade onward—it amazes me. He said, “I always dreamed of being a teacher.” Does he experience that dream of teaching as life, or as a tunnel? If he experiences it as life, then there is really no dream there: it is his daily work, and he feels joy in that work and in what he brings to everyone around him. That is wonderful. But if he believes he has accomplished the dream he set himself, that is a major problem, because he is a slave to that tunnel, to the teaching he did inside the school. If you see purpose as a goal, a structure for achieving a particular goal, or a way to get some effect for yourself—for example, having everyone say how wonderful you are, putting you on an honor board, singling you out—you will never resolve this. But if you approach purpose from a broad perspective, asking what it is, purpose means understanding why I, as a spiritual being, am here at all.

To do that, you need to understand that you are not a physical body. Incidentally, have you noticed that people talk about purpose and then immediately say they will rely on science? What purpose for your life could there be in that science? If we rely on science, then you have no purpose; supposedly you have complete freedom to choose with your brain and do whatever you want. What purpose would you have, then? That purpose does not exist.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Yes.

AVAlexander Volchek

If you base your thinking on purpose, you are saying there are premises rooted in the spiritual world. If so, the spiritual world comes first. And if the spiritual world comes first, you need to study how it works. You need to study heredity, the psychophysics accumulated over a lifetime, and karmic causes and effects. There is the energy of your spiritual being, the karma of the country and people you belong to, the current energy of the social space, and the influence of the spiritual world currently outside you. There is the influence of spiritual beings, different worlds and energies around you, and interactions with different spiritual people. What does purpose become, then? In this case, it means understanding all these patterns simultaneously, at all times. There is no purpose that can be expressed in one phrase, because even in terms of time, there is a long span containing a broad range of things happening to me at once. I am giving you an interview while blood flows through my body. I have one child, and a second, a third, and a fourth. I have a dog, a mother, a wife, a business, work, meters, bills, stocks, followers, and people. Right now, some people are certainly watching my videos.

Thousands or tens of thousands of people take in what I put out. Can you imagine how many points of contact that creates at once? At the same time, I hear the road, cars, birds, and planes. There is a very broad range of things happening simultaneously, extending over time, and I exist within this whole system. You might say, “That's all nonsense. We need to single out a task to accomplish.” What task? If I single one out, I make it more important than our meeting here. Or I could say our meeting was my purpose. But that is strange too: surely we have other purposes in life. All right, suppose my purpose was to have children. Then our meeting has no significance at all.

Which children, specifically? How many? And do you raise them or not? Just give birth, or raise them? Just give birth, or observe different states with them, including when you are yelling at them, or they are yelling at you, when your child says they hate you, or when they say they love you? Which specific things interest you? Are you interested in being with your wife in great joy or in great unhappiness? Which moment interests you: when you bury her, when you are together, or when she buries you? Or when you simply divorce? What exactly interests you in this purpose, this event you want to see? As soon as you choose one particular event, you have burned your whole life down to that event. That is not life. A life cannot consist of just one event.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

One point.

AVAlexander Volchek

There are an enormous number of things happening now and across time. Here is an interesting addition to what I am saying. Someone who listens to this wrote, “I understand purpose as not looking for something special for myself. There is a true purpose shared by all people, and we need to live within that common purpose. The true purpose of all people is to live for others, to live from the perspective of—

Understanding truth, studying the world, the Universe, and everything happening. But what should I do now if I do not understand what I personally need to do to truly live in relation to the spiritual world?” When I received this question, at first I was somewhat puzzled. What does it reveal? It reveals that the person has not understood what true purpose is. Do not rush to understand it. That is very important. Your task is not to understand it, check a box, and say, “Now I know everything.” An incredible number of people say, “I know there is a spiritual world,” yet in every situation in their lives, they act on the basis of the material world. In the hardest situations, they rely entirely on it. Do not rush. Keep observing and remain in that search. Becoming aware of this is not the most important task of your life. That is very important, because living by the laws of the Universe means living by those laws, not understanding one hundred percent of everything happening.

I talk extensively on this channel about those laws and what to do. But for a great many people, it is not enough. You tell someone that it is enough to see how another person feels and pay attention to that state, and they say, “No, I want something more. I want to learn something else.” Moreover, there is your spiritual being and your spiritual system. It does not live entirely in the physical world. It has a spiritual world and a spiritual dimension to its life. Your spiritual being has a certain plan agreed with the spiritual hierarchies, including its development within the spiritual world. That comes first, not your life here. When you think about your purpose, you treat it as the most important thing happening. Meanwhile, your spiritual being cries out, “No, no! There is me!” If it could cry out at all, it would say, “Oh God, I am so tired of this ant. What is it doing or not doing now? Another ant, another day, another set of events.” But there is a spiritual world living through all of this.

You go to sleep at night, and your spiritual life is working incredibly actively. You are not conscious of what is happening. You are not conscious of your own life for at least a third of it. What are you talking about? You are not even conscious in the spiritual world. Incidentally, that is a crucial part of your life, where your purpose takes place. That is where it happens. You lie down, and your “I” and astral body separate from your physical and etheric bodies—“The brain, yes”—and go off to experience and process what you have lived through here, to embody it in the spiritual world. That is living. It is like a real thought. Why should your memory be poor? Why should it be poor? Because you learned something, lived through it, let it go, and forgot it—even felt upset that you had let it go. You lived through it because the thought entered your system, was stored, and lives in your etheric body. Then it left that body and entered the spiritual world, where it was processed. That energy was processed, and new energy arrived. If you keep it here, it remains in you as a phantom, just as taking pills, antibiotics for example, creates another phantom body.

It lives with you. There are trillions of those phantom bodies inside. They need to be processed and released so that the spiritual world can live through them. That is the point: the spiritual world needs to live through this, instead of you saying, “Now I'll write down a formula and understand.” What can you understand? You are endlessly understanding all sorts of states of joy and suffering at once. What do you understand? Every day I see people who tell me, “I've finally become aware.” Then they come back two weeks later: “I feel bad.” But you had only just become aware that you felt bad. The same thing again. They keep pulling that winch around and around, endlessly repeating the same thing. You need to rise higher and understand that there is a higher system that is aware, and above that system another higher system that is aware. Your spiritual being is also enslaved. It has been damaged by a staggering amount of dark energy. When you incarnate, you are enslaved to Ahrimanic or Luciferic systems. You cannot get out of them at all. That is why there is karma, death, and illness.

All of this exists because you cannot get out. If a person could live for thousands of years, they would sink into endless filth. They need to die so that at least something can happen. Suppose someone lived for six hundred years, spending all six hundred years living through heredity and psychophysics without even getting to karma. “Come on, let's kill him so his being can finally start living its own life.” Then you still have those six hundred years to make up for in terms of living through karma. To make up for that experience. Of course, this leads to an entirely different understanding of your question. You look at it and see that purposes and goals are tiny manifestations here. Anyone can see this easily. For example, right now you are concerned about your relationship with your husband and how you will build a worldwide design organization. And it must not just be worldwide, but cosmic—not merely cosmic, but encompassing galaxies of the past, future, and present, every season of existence, and preferably angels, archangels, absolutely everyone.

And you still will not be satisfied. “So far beyond reach.” You still will not be satisfied. You care about your children, your relationship with their nanny, the garden, the dogs, the cat, your friends, the mountain across from you. Why is it hot today? The water has stopped working, the air conditioner, the coffee that tastes good or bad—all of these relationships concern you. But take you back thirty years, Tanya, and nothing I just listed had anything to do with you. If I asked what concerned you, you would say, “Sasha, damn it, I have something important. I know what concerns me.” Why even go back twenty years? Take you back seven or eight years, and none of this was there. When you came and we talked, completely different things concerned you. “Yes, exactly.” Completely different things. Even now, your psychophysics is reacting automatically. It is as though it has been turned inside out, stripped bare. You have become bare energy, because I turned it inside out, and the system immediately begins shutting down. Look at that.

Notice this very important pattern, Tanya. You used to be dealing with completely different tasks. In ten years you will be dealing with completely different tasks again. Could the very same mountain still concern you? In theory, yes. But it is very important to see what is happening in life. Some aspects remain: your relationship with your mother, for example. It interested you then and it interests you now. Some things may have stayed exactly as they were. Or your relationship with your brother: “Nothing has changed. It's just as it was.” Some aspects stay with you, while others turn out to be completely different. What purpose are we talking about, then? A purpose we like at this particular moment, one we elevate into something exalted. There is a flaw in thinking in terms of purpose that everyone needs to know about: you are placing a bet on your life, as in a casino. Any event you imagine—even if it were written into the spiritual world and you had studied it, read it, and knew you needed to bring it about—

You need to understand that you may not achieve it. That is why people now say the goal is not what matters; the path toward it is. But they still keep the goal. A goal may be unattainable, so they remove that emphasis. Some people say you must set a goal beyond your lifetime: build a company that will outlive you. But it will die too. Everything will die; everyone certainly will. Or someone says, “Then I will raise a family that will create something incredible after me.” There are people who say that. There are unattainable goals that appeal to you now. When people talk about the path, they essentially keep those same goals, saying, “They may not be achieved, so there will be the path.” But the point is neither the goal nor the path. Set out a great many different possibilities and allow that they matter to you now, but in thirty minutes they may no longer matter.

I keep explaining this. I know that for some of my employees, perhaps—

I keep explaining this. I know this business may matter to an employee right now, but tomorrow they may come to work having fallen in love with someone new and decided to move to Australia for the rest of their life. They may no longer care about any of this. They have every right to that. Once you allow that another person, that other people, have that right, you can allow that things in your own life may turn out in all sorts of different ways. As for goals, even if you set them, you can say, “Let this goal stand. It has these principles and these criteria for fulfillment.” Some goals need to be allowed for. But the grand things we call our purpose may not be fulfilled, and may not be fulfilled because you decide not to fulfill them. Many people say you need a dream and must pursue it single-mindedly, fighting for it. That is a distorted psyche. That belongs in a psychiatric hospital. You need to be completely independent of everything. Of course, you depend on ordinary things, like Earth's gravity. You depend on spiritual hierarchies you are not aware of. By all means, remain unaware of them—but you depend on them absolutely.

If the archangels switched off right now, you would die at that very moment. That cannot happen. But if it theoretically did, you would die. Certain activity in your internal physical organs would stop instantly. Instantly. Or you would fly upward as though into space and explode. That might be something to take an interest in. So what is the only purpose a human being can have? A universal purpose: to move toward the light, to follow the true course of human development, the infinite development of one's spiritual being. The human task is to explore and study this without ever knowing it all, because no brain can take it all in. And everything in the world has developed, is developing, and will continue developing. Everything, without pause. If everything develops, then you will explore and study yourself endlessly. And if everything develops, then what surrounds you develops too. Imagine, Tanya: all of that also needs to be studied.

Constantly. You are one way as you sit here today. Yet I know this is the same spiritual being I saw before. I see it immediately. It says, “Ha, I'm exactly the same.” Figuratively speaking. In the spiritual world, I look and see it is all the same, Tanya. What happened here was a flash that passed by. There is an endless field to explore there. Even here, we do not know what will happen in our lives. We might start gardens, shops, a business, or centers, teach people together, work and serve under someone together, become partners or enemies, send each other to prison, or become cellmates. We might move to another country, or to different countries; die in the same year or in different years; be present at each other's deaths or not; attend our children's weddings together or not. “Or have children.” Or have children. When I meet people, I say, “Imagine if you knew from the very beginning what our shared life would be like.”

Imagine if, back then, you had truly known, with the full experience of it, how your relationship with me would unfold, for example. You would have done some things differently. “In terms of attention.” Exactly. In terms of engaging with another person, perhaps at the right moment you would have looked at me a little more as a human being, and I would have looked at you that way. A human being—not the particular events, not a first and last name, not what you needed to get at that moment, but a broader view of what was really happening. You might have looked and thought, “Oh, how interesting,” instead of shutting yourself off. That does not mean I would have rescued you somewhere, done something better for you, or something worse. It is not about that at all. It is about, “Damn, that is interesting. How can I look at this?” We might never meet again in this life, but meet in other lives. Or perhaps we have already lived together for hundreds of years.

That is interesting. Imagine meeting someone you dislike, who dislikes you. You are enemies. Then someone gives you twelve volumes, an enormous War and Peace of your lives together. You begin reading and understand why you dislike each other. It does not explain that explicitly; it simply describes where you were and what you did. It is like putting on a movie or a series, knowing it is true. Imagine being shown that series. Tanya, I guarantee you would start watching it with this person. Someone says, “Watch it for six months.” You would meet up, buy popcorn, drink tea, and watch. You would laugh, feel joy, talk, roar with laughter, feel embarrassed, love and hate at the same time. At some point you would look at this person and say, “I think I love this person more than my husband. I think I love them more than my mother.” Imagine living through all that: there is your mother, your father, your children—anyone.

If that were possible. If consciousness could be expanded like that. In reality, not everyone has had a great many incarnations; most people do not have that many. But if it were possible, imagine seeing that. Your attention would be entirely different. It is like the neighbors you live near on the other side of the bay, by San Francisco. Imagine having to live in a bunker with ten neighbors, ten families, for a week—not a week, but a year. You would relate to one another differently. You would develop a different consciousness and a different relationship. Even if you locked a husband and wife in a bunker together for a year, they would get to know themselves differently. My wife recently sent me something—perhaps it was a hint—about how a husband and wife absolutely need to take vacations together. I take this very lightly. I think you need to vacation together and separately, with different wives and husbands, and so on.

Not in that sense. I mean you need variety in your perception: many businesses and few, a lot of work and little, more of one thing and less of another. You need to be able to rest alone, with one child, with two or three, in different pairings, with your wife, and so on. To go away comfortably with a male friend or a female friend. They are different types of rest, with different details. The piece explained that when you and your husband or wife travel somewhere as a couple, you enter unfamiliar circumstances. You have to solve certain problems in a new city, for example, and deal with other things. I laughed at that: what problems, when I plan, buy, and arrange everything? Some people have to solve things and others do not. But that is the point. Put me in a bunker with one of my daughters for four weeks, and our relationship will change for the rest of our lives. For life, Tanya. If you put me in a bunker with her, we will spend most of our time meditating.

I guarantee it. Most of our time will be spent meditating. But if we are not completely isolated, well, we will get there. For me, that would be an incredible achievement, because there are limits on my interactions with my children when it comes to explaining certain things. Obviously it would be a different reality, a wonder: an entirely different way of interacting with a child, another life. Then we think of our parents: we are already forty-two, and that has not happened and will not happen. That unique way of knowing one another will not happen. My mother came to stay with me the year before last for a month and a half. By the time she left, everyone was unhappy with the situation: my mother, my wife, me, everyone. My sister said, “We probably spent too much time together.” I said, “But you could approach it—

From a different angle. We spent forty-five days together, twelve hours a day. When have I ever spent that much time with her?” That is a wonder. An incredible wonder that we did it at all. Or Vitalik: last time he visited, he stayed with me for three weeks, twenty-one days. We talked for fifteen hours every day. I spent more time with him than with any of my friends in Moscow. Do you know how much time that is? It is like meeting up over three or four years.

UPUnidentified participant

Meeting up…

AVAlexander Volchek

Three or four years, every weekend, for two hours, for example.

And every time you start the same thing over again. Often you watch a movie too, the same thing going around in circles. It is different from sitting down and giving this person your attention, having them give you theirs, connecting, and truly, sincerely living your whole life together, with an insatiable appetite for that experience. I know that if we were put together for five hundred hours, we would spend all five hundred hours examining and discussing things, examining and discussing. My desire to discuss myself and you would not run out, and your desire to discuss yourself probably would not run out either. We would find something to discuss. That is my point. Why don't we do this with the people around us? We don't. We live with husbands, wives, children, and parents just as we meet friends on weekends: one-sided, repetitive actions, rather than truly engaging with each other with our whole consciousness and sensitivity.

That takes time, Tanya. You need to set time aside. Remember how we discussed making a video today about why I would like my mother to come and visit me? That needs time: hours of conversation, discussion, and sharing, exploring the subject from different angles and with different people. You could write a research paper, a dissertation, devote a life to it. Someone might say, “What are you making all this up for?” But this is real human life: coming to know one another truly, without limiting it to certain things. Sometimes I meet someone wanting to get to know them, and we sit drinking coffee, and I realize today will be nothing more than coffee.

UPUnidentified participant

A kind of ping-pong.

AVAlexander Volchek

And ping-pong.

UPUnidentified participant

Not good.

AVAlexander Volchek

Yes, ping-pong. You sit talking and realize it is the same thing again. The conversation is not flowing; something is off. So we play our familiar social games again. You are not with the person in a state of truly understanding what is happening, giving attention to this person and this life. That reminds me of something. I recently sat talking with my wife. “Is your microphone recording?” “Not yet.” Good, because we will have your voice. I was talking with my wife about something, and for the first time in my life, Tanya, I experienced a certain feeling. First, during our conversation, I gathered all the space and all the energy to truly hear her, to give her love so she would have the strength for this conversation, and I would have the strength for it too. For the first time, I encountered this energy and had to live through it: was I ready to sacrifice myself for her?

Now. At that very moment. Not an empty sacrifice, the kind expressed as “I give my life for her.” That is not what I mean. At that moment it is not for myself, not for something else, not for her, but for spiritual truth. That is truly coming to know another person, truly living in a conversation, in communication with them. A real conversation, a life with another person, is when you give your whole self to that person, sacrifice yourself completely. Not a single limitation remains. Nothing holds you back—not your blood, your children, your relatives, or your loved ones. At that moment, for some reason, you are entirely in that sacrifice. It is not a question of love, of husband and wife. It is a question of true self-sacrifice for another human being. It is an entirely different way of experiencing reality.