Aggression and spirituality: is it possible to be angry and spiritually developed?

AVAlexander Volchek

There are also outward signs of a spiritual person: someone who wears particular clothes, spends time in particular places, sits in particular poses, and looks distinctive. The very act of comparing spirituality is itself an act of ego. Does that mean I can begin shouting or raise my voice while my inner state has absolutely no destructive motivation directed toward causing another person physical or psychological harm?

UPUnidentified participant

Mm-hmm.

AVAlexander Volchek

Who is being aggressive at that moment? The person doing bad things who thinks others are being aggressive toward them? What are spiritually developed people, anyway? When you ask what qualities a spiritual person should have, you mean qualities such as calm, balance, and quiet. What sort of person is usually considered spiritually developed? A particular tone of voice; they cannot be rude; they must express themselves in a special way, become contemplative, retreat into a kind of silence. Then that person is in a state of spirituality. There are also outward signs: particular clothes, particular places, particular sitting positions, a distinctive appearance—long hair, perhaps, or a beard. They visit certain places. Could you see such a person in a coffee shop, for example? Society treats that as a big question: “How? What is that?” Mentioning coffee shops reminded me of an interesting association, an example. I live in California, in the United States. I clearly remember how strange it initially felt to see people in police or firefighter uniforms in cafés, restaurants, or coffee shops. It was very unfamiliar to me.

Of course, people here see it as completely normal. Many may not understand what I mean. But after twelve years in Moscow and twenty—how many?—twenty-seven years in Minsk, it felt completely unfamiliar. An unfamiliar perception. You perceive these people differently, as somehow different. Not just different people: they even have different laws, different feelings, different lives. Certain circumstances are imposed on them: they are a different kind of person with particular characteristics. The world moves on. Perhaps a coffee shop would not raise this question for you at twenty-four. You might say, “Police officers are in coffee shops. There is nothing strange about it to me.” But I have traveled a longer path, especially in my formative years, living in places without coffee shops or many cafés and restaurants. All of that developed gradually. It was not an absolutely normal, ordinary thing to me. Just as my grandmother did not go to cafés; that was not normal for her.

We have particular ways of perceiving people. If we see someone in monastic robes walking through a city—and we have not gone to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet—we think, “That is definitely a spiritual person.” In Lhasa, you might see everyone as spiritual. But is that really so? Does it have anything to do with it? In many cultures, people dressed in another religion's clothing evoke entirely different responses. For Christians in places where Islam is not practiced, people in Muslim clothing are a different story. Are women who are fully covered perceived as spiritual people? Do you see them that way? Society generally does not perceive them as spiritual people; it perceives them differently. Different emotions arise. Yet a Buddhist in Moscow, for example, is immediately perceived as spiritual from their appearance. Or a Hindu, or someone wearing bright orange, is perceived differently. This is a vivid illustration: a woman in Muslim dress, someone in Buddhism wearing a particular color, and your perception changes. You are looking at that outward sign instead of the person.

Expectations about a person's character are added too. This is an obvious story, an obvious story introduced to separate people from the understanding that every person is spiritual, every person is a spiritual being and a spiritual structure. Everyone has spiritual worlds and spiritual bodies. At their source, everyone is spiritual consciousness and creation, not a material collection of organs or a physical body. The physical body is part of the person. It is not that it is not them; it is part of them. This matters, because there is so much talk of the material world not being real and only the spiritual world being real—a complete separation from the material world. Within the basic picture, these criteria are imposed on people. Let us look at them: what is someone who speaks calmly, someone who is irritated, or someone who says words in different tones? How do we usually perceive an aggressive person? How do we usually perceive aggression? Another person perceives it; it is their own perception of aggression.

Sitting here with me, you could say, “You are aggressive.” That would be your own perception of aggression. There is my perception of my aggression and your perception of it. Your perception of aggression in me, someone else, or yourself uses a completely different scale from my understanding of aggression. Completely different. Modern society often treats certain established criteria as aggression. Certain established criteria. What does “speaking loudly” mean? Some people speak a little more quietly, some a little louder. Does that make them aggressive? Does it mean they raised their voice? Perhaps that is their natural voice. I naturally speak quite loudly, and quite a lot. Does that mean I am in a state of aggression or conveying aggression by speaking loudly? Hardly. Using the voice and expressing different psychophysical states, such as particular emotions, can have different causes. Some are external. If someone runs at me with a knife, my body will mobilize. If a bear charges at me, my whole system will mobilize—not just my body, but my entire psychophysical system.

Mobilizing means different things for different people. Someone may lose all composure and consciousness; someone else may become very focused and move into a defensive response. That response may be expressed as aggression. Is aggression bad in that case? Or is a sharp statement bad when falsehood is everywhere and you need to raise your voice to tell the truth? This is a long discussion. A long discussion. Very difficult events are happening in the world now. The whole world has been put into a state of believing we live in quiet, harmony, and romance, especially since World War II. What does “everything is peaceful everywhere” mean? In reality, nothing is peaceful. There are enormous numbers of conflicts—not only military conflicts or cyber conflicts involving computers, but conflicts in people's minds and in how they relate to one another. Now the number of conflicts has sharply increased, and everyone says, “Oh, conflicts!” But they were already there.

What has changed? What has changed? Someone has begun saying it aloud, lying to people's faces. Before, were they lying behind their backs? What is the difference between lying to someone's face and lying elsewhere? What is the difference? With so many different conflicts, we have many discussions about whether different actions are justified: whether one action or another is good, even if it takes a form we call aggression. So when we look—

when we look at aggression, we need to understand the source of that state. What produces it? A need to defend, a desire to harm others, or a desire to reveal and highlight the truth? In that case, perhaps we should not call it aggression. If we look up the terminology, aggression probably means an action directed at someone to cause that person harm.

If you are not causing harm and the action is not directed that way—let us look up aggression together. Yes: motivated destructive behavior intended to cause physical or psychological harm. Exactly what I said. This raises an interesting point. Could I start shouting, raise my voice, or appear outwardly angry while my inner state has absolutely no destructive motivation aimed at causing another person physical or psychological harm? This is very important. Can I be in that state without directing any destructive force at anyone? Who determines what is destructive, anyway? Someone has determined what counts as destruction. Someone has decided what you can and cannot do.

Someone decided that.

OSOlga Stolyarova

Or if it causes someone pain of some kind. But again, I understand that—

AVAlexander Volchek

What kind of pain? Exactly. The next question is what kind of pain. Imagine someone who lies and steals.

Someone tells them, “What you are doing is wrong.” Hearing that they are doing something wrong hurts them.

Who is aggressive at that moment? The person doing bad things who thinks someone is being aggressive toward them, or the other person trying to stop them or show them that they cannot be here behaving that way? Who is aggressive? We can see a very interesting, subtle point here. There is always some truth, and a person can make their own mistakes in identifying that truth. They may not fully perceive what is true and what is not. On the other hand, when we speak of a spiritual person, we suppose, for example, that such a person cannot do bad things. Can a spiritually developed person do bad things? That is the question. Can a spiritually developed person do bad things? This is a fundamentally different side of the matter, but also important to examine alongside the first part. To understand whether a spiritually developed person can do bad things, we need to understand what a spiritual person is.

When we discuss spiritual people, we understand perfectly well that the world is spiritual.

I will repeat: if you believe the world is physical, discussing spiritually developed people is pointless. Then “a spiritually developed person” is a material construct, a material description of spiritual development. It is like beautiful or not beautiful. Is Prada beautiful? Is Louis Vuitton beautiful? Is a daisy beautiful? It is a discussion: is this painting beautiful? What about that one? Is this sculpture beautiful? Is that sculpture beautiful? These are discussions about what beauty, words, or forms we are considering. Can we label another person spiritually developed because they never shout at their children, never scold anyone, and wear gray clothes? We can attach that label. But do you know what they feel inside? Could someone never express anger outwardly yet constantly feel anger inside and restrain it every time?

This is a very interesting point to observe in yourself. Imagine you have learned to work on yourself and recognize situations in which you become aggressive toward others. You see the situation and hold yourself back. Is that restraint a sign of spirituality, or a sign of the opposite?

OSOlga Stolyarova

For me, probably the opposite. The question is how I—

AVAlexander Volchek

That is relative. When you practice and develop, it is, on one hand, a sign of spirituality. It is not the opposite of spirituality; it is a sign of spirituality, because you are trying not to harm another person. Definitely a sign. On the other hand, if it is a performance to appear different to other people while concealing what is happening inside, that is a sign of the opposite. But making an effort, the very fact of making that effort, is a sign that someone is on the path of knowing truth. They want to understand it and work with it. Hiding it behind a wrapper as a motive is something entirely different. I have often heard people close to me say—well, not often; sometimes. My wife, for example, has sometimes said, “You hide the truth behind your spirituality.” What does that mean? There is my behavior during the day, and then I may come home, set a limit, say something sharply, or raise my voice at the children. She says, “Look, you act this way here and differently there.

You are hiding it.” I say, “No, I raise my voice in public too. I set limits in public too. I behave exactly the same. I do not change.” Only the person themselves can determine this. Olya, the most interesting thing is that only the person themselves—or initiates who can see and assess them from outside—can determine it. What does determining it yourself mean? You can know why you are doing this now. Am I truly making an effort for the sake of truth? I know I am not doing it for myself. The opposite of aggression would be constructive behavior aimed at benefiting another person. Bringing them benefit. The self is not there; it does not exist there at all. You could say the self is absent in aggression too, in destroying another person, but speaking generally: I can think only of the other person in my behavior and block harmful actions from a true understanding that other people need light, goodness, and love. I need to remember that they are human beings. Constantly remember that every person is a human being, rather than act from my own motives of perception.

Or do I restrain myself to appear that way, to get the right contract or a good assessment? Why am I doing it? We live in a world with an incredible amount of manipulation in this area. Later we see exposés: this priest turned out to have four wives, that one killed someone, another did something else. People enjoy watching: “Look, he was doing something wrong!” Before that, they went to his sermons and listened without truly trying to understand who he was, without seeing the whole picture, understanding it, or knowing how to perceive it. They did not understand whether what was being conveyed came from ego or from truth. This is very important: is it coming from ego, or is it truth? That brings us to the next point. Can kindness be conveyed through ego? Of course. Judging by what we have discussed—of course. Of course, as we have discussed, ego can convey absolutely anything: the most desirable, the best thing this world has to offer.

This is the basis for a person losing themselves, for being taken over by Luciferic energies, among others. Those energies can convey to someone that they are Jesus Christ and will spread goodness everywhere, while in fact they act in a distorted way. Another question arises: can truth be expressed through things other than smiling all the time or thinking only of the word “love”—through resolving situations? Resolving many situations requires death. Requires death. It requires cutting down a tree, closing a building or a company: destroying something, closing something. If a company or people do bad things, the company is closed down, liquidated, fined, and so on.

They receive fines; someone goes to prison, is locked up. Are these bad actions toward those people? They are bad for them. This is an interesting point. I have a channel about artificial intelligence. We recently made a video about safety: AI safety, the safety of artificial intelligence in the broad sense. We discussed a lot, but that is not the point. Max, who was filming with me, talked about Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics in science fiction: creating robots, not harming people, doing various things, and so on, up to the third law. The third was very interesting: not harming itself, provided that does not conflict with the first laws concerning harm to people, society, and so forth. What does a robot not harming itself mean? If it works for people, how does it not harm itself? That is very interesting. It is a very interesting thought. A very interesting thought. Looking at many countries, we see their governments promoting an interesting idea about their citizens.

They treat them like those robots, like hamsters, using certain laws while saying nothing about that final point: not harming each person, just as the robot must not harm itself. You do not harm yourself. You do not harm yourself even when those people tell you something. You say, “No, I will not do that, because it violates other spaces. I will not do that for you. I will do entirely different things for you.” When someone in a state of true goodness pounds a fist on the table or says sharply, “Everyone stop right now!” because children have scattered in a forest with dangerous snakes, they gather all their power and strength to deal with it. Or they defend themselves against others, or someone has taken over their home and they come back to reclaim it. At that moment, truth is expressed entirely differently. The concept of truth arises. Notice where we have arrived: what is truth, then? The question is no longer how behavior is expressed or what it looks like.

If it is truth, the actions can vary. Then we see people manipulating the concept of truth: “This is the truth, so we killed those people,” or “This is the truth, so we introduced this law,” or “This is the truth, so I will speak to my children this way.” It spreads through society to every individual: “This is the truth, so I will send my child to this school, then that school. They must get into university, because afterward they must find a job. If they do not find a job, they will die.” That is the truth. There is such a truth. People put thousands of different truths into their heads. Thousands of different truths. When we observe and study another person and their spiritual development, we need this approach. We made a separate video about what spiritually developed people are. You can watch it here or on the meditation channel, so we do not go into a long repetition.

I want to repeat that what a person does here, in everyday life, reflects the development of their spiritual structure only to a very limited extent. A very limited extent, in terms of their strength and state of consciousness. I have given a simple example and will give it again: Lucifer. A fallen angel belongs to a higher spiritual hierarchy than an ordinary human being. What actions does this structure take? What actions? It is considered opposed to humanity. This is very important. In terms of spiritual development, it is a very substantial spiritual structure. Someone may stop me and say, “Alexander, we are talking specifically about human spiritual development, without moving into another hierarchy.” If we mean the human being specifically, recognizing that other spiritual hierarchies exist, let us define the criteria for measuring this. As I said, those criteria are a very specific subject requiring study and observation. Today's topic is different. If someone says something sharply, spits on the pavement, lights a cigarette, or shouts at their child, does that make them spiritually undeveloped?

Does that make them spiritually undeveloped? That is the important point. There is another very, very important point: we are speaking about a living spiritual being. Completely alive. If you understand the spiritual world, you need to understand that at any moment, any person may manifest an incredibly large amount of energy or have that energy taken away—not all of it, but an enormous layer. They can enter a space where they lose perception and fall into a kind of animal state, the animal aspect of a human being, behaving very strangely even for a few seconds. Conversely, a wave of particular energies may wash over anyone. Someone who seems completely unbalanced, restless, unreasonable, and treats others badly can suddenly behave like the most kind and gracious person there has ever been. Even from true motives: truth opens to them and begins flowing from them. Something else may happen to another person. This is very important to understand. That is why we should always be careful about judging someone for an action—why I even gave the example of smoking a cigarette—and look more broadly at what is happening and what causes those actions.

What causes them? If someone has been provoked a hundred times, they may show aggression the hundred and first time simply because their psychophysical system cannot take it. In fact, before that, they had made an incredible effort a hundred times. From society's perspective, that may be an effort most people on Earth could not bear. At that moment, those circumstances and energies appeared because they are a living person. I have done a great deal of bodywork in my life, having someone work with my body. One person close to me did that work. I would sometimes ask, “Why has this tension appeared here again?” He said, “Because you are a living person. It is natural and normal for tension to appear, for an adhesion or injury to develop. You are alive. A living person, completely alive.” We are not even discussing the fact that we do not control all the different events that happen—or control them only relatively.

A month or a month and a half ago, I went skating with my children and fell on both knees. My knees still hurt quite badly. I fell by accident; there was no cause behind it. I know it was a completely free event. In terms of spiritual perception and understanding of space, it did not need a cause so that my knees would hurt afterward. There was an event: I fell. I had been skating for a long time and fairly well, and then this tiny action happened. What is one small fall? Yet that tiny action created circumstances and sensations in my physical body. It caused an injury, and that injury may develop further. If it becomes serious, that is an ordinary karmic process, although it can go in either direction. We need to understand that a karmic process also works in the other direction. What does that mean? Many people think a serious illness results from actions in previous lives. You can become ill, and the illness can be a karmic event for something that will happen in the future. Do you understand?

Someone may object: “Wait, Alexander, karma is linked to untruthful behavior and the cause-and-effect consequences of that untruthfulness, which need balancing.” But the illness will form the basis for events that follow and bring their own balance of truth. When it enters a person's life, can that person, in a state of freedom, die earlier or not take certain actions? Of course. All of these things will be restructured. That can happen without any difficulty, because freedom exists. When we say freedom exists, we must mean freedom for both good and bad events, for any events. That is the point of freedom. So this level of freedom—

this level of freedom, when we use that word, is chaos. That is why there are certain pure states. I think I showed a state beyond freedom and chaos in meditation forty, or thirty-nine or thirty-eight, on my meditation channel. From a basic standpoint, what is it and how does it happen? The first thing to understand and accept is this: calmly recognize that the very act of comparing spirituality, of assessing someone's spiritual development, is already not a spiritual action. It is an act of ego in itself, because that kind of assessment is meaningless. Comparing people spiritually by the quantity or volume of energy as an indicator of development—saying “spiritually developed”—puts some people a little above others. Just as many educated people put themselves a little above other people. The very existence of this comparison is already outside a spiritual approach.

Can we compare different indicators? Yes, but not with the aim of separating people or elevating them. First, we need to say that all people are spiritual and all people are developing spiritually. Why? Because everyone is moving spiritually; everything is moving. Someone may develop toward truth, deteriorate, or leave their path. What you mention—how someone feels inside and whether this is an indicator—is a good thing to examine. That is all. If they seek and act to create an indicator, we have said that is the opposite of development: it is ego. If they seek and do good things to appear good, that is the opposite of development for them. That is all. The answer is simple: if they do it truthfully, without trying to appear a certain way, that is definitely natural evolutionary development. Another question arises: “At the very beginning, before I understood any of this, could I start doing many good things because other people tell me about them, because I cannot determine what is good or bad?

Could I do them because people say they are right, so I can move forward and be better as a person?” Of course. That is much better than doing nothing. Much better than not looking. There is no competition or measuring here. It is a normal, healthy process: a person becomes aware of what they are doing and acts because they may have read about it somewhere, or because society speaks well of it. If the action is true, let them do it. Let them do it that way too. Gradually, it will genuinely take shape within them—it will take shape inside—but it has to grow and take shape within them. People endlessly offer definitions and show all kinds of things. Again, an enormous number of those definitions are rooted in lies, in what is not real. You do not fully see the layer behind them. That is why I said we live in an interesting world. The new US president is in his second year, and he has shown the world a different way of conducting politics.

For example, you can come out and say, “Eggs have become cheaper, not more expensive,” or “Gas has become cheaper,” when at the time it had become more expensive and only later became cheaper. Or you say, “Tomorrow I will make it green,” then turn up tomorrow and say, “Red.” Someone says, “Here is the recording where you said green,” and you say, “Red.” In reality, he began doing what global politics already does. Without taking sides, judging positively or negatively, or going into the details, he simply has a different manner of behaving. That difference feels strange to everyone. People are used to saying, “Why say it openly to everyone? Better to say nothing and just do the bad thing somewhere.” They are used to it. They are used to a different sort of lying: saying you will not introduce tariffs, then introducing them gradually so nobody notices. Lies are supposed to be different. People are used to a slightly different kind of lying in politics. This is simply different behavior. I gave this example not to condemn someone—this is important—or, conversely, to say it is very good.

It is just an example. An obvious example of distinctive structures and patterns of behavior. We need to look at what actually lies behind those patterns, what motive is really behind them. What is the motive? Why is it like that? I often film in this space. There are paintings here. Are they hanging here for the filming, or are they simply here? That matters. Are the flowers in vases for the filming, or are they simply flowers in vases? There is a big difference. A big difference. You see this in a person: how they look outside and at home, how they speak or dress on Zoom, how they dress and speak in the office, in a coffee shop or store, when they see someone else, at the dog park, with friends or with anyone else. What are they like overall? What is their life like across a broad range of situations? What do they perceive, do, and see across that range?

Can someone take part in different discussions and different subject areas—different discussions, different subject areas? What are they actually like? What is really behind it? Why do they do particular things? What causes their actions? We watch enormous numbers of videos. My mother sometimes gives me examples of bloggers talking about America. I say, “Mom, do not judge America by what one person says. You need to understand their motives. Perhaps it is a commissioned video. Perhaps it reflects their guest's experience, or their own. Perhaps that was their mood. Perhaps they had problems, or the opposite—good fortune. Perhaps they changed their opinion a month ago. Let us see the broader range.” It is good to look at people's lives across a wide range, in a broad context. When you observe someone described as spiritually developed in that broad context, you can begin finding words for it or identifying things. Otherwise, consider people who practice black magic, dark rituals, or very serious spiritual practices intended to bring them personal advantage and profit. Their own advantage and profit. If they can perform such rituals, are you sure they are undeveloped?

How much energy do many of those things require? How much? That is why I ask: development measured in what? If these are just labels, that is one thing: particular hair, a particular history or structure, outward characteristics. Or are we measuring the range of truth in energies? Which energies, which worlds, what range of the world? What range are we descending into? What range? From the material world's perspective, stars have a physical structure. From the spiritual world's perspective, stars are spiritual beings. A planet is a spiritual being; it does not have a material construction. What are we talking about, then? What we see is not a material object. In the broader scope of what we see, it is not a material object. It always depends on the terms of the conversation and the level at which people are speaking. It is also a matter of being able to take part in that conversation, just as you need to be able to hold a conversation with children.