You Can Change the World

In some ways, it’s a dark time in the history of the world and humanity.

It seems easy to look around and find a lack of compassion for human suffering and our planet, war, and conflict, and desperate, disenfranchised people just trying to survive.

The news is full of stories that highlight the violence, death, and despair that result from choices people make based on fear and delusion.

It’s not too difficult to get sucked into a feeling of helplessness, resisting the world as it is and wanting it to change for the better. Can’t people just come to their senses and be kind to each other?

Staying stuck in this story of resistance, if you’re like me, you’ll feel a knot of tension inside that sits there, unmoving, every time you read another report of struggle and misery somewhere in the world.

So what to do? Do we wait—and hope—for things to change?

Certainly, if you feel moved to take action for the betterment of humankind, then do that. Volunteer, join an organization you support, donate money, and use your vote wisely.

But there’s something more essential that is possible, and that is to realize that every single choice you make matters.

Can you control how those in power govern? Can you end war or feed those who are starving? For the most part, no.

But what you absolutely can do is turn your attention inward, shine the light of awareness on your own conditioned patterns and confused thinking, and live in the world as a beacon of clarity and love. By doing so, you’re ending the inner war with your own experience.

This is what heals division and brings the objects of the world—including you—to be more in alignment with their natural state of peace and love.

You might feel helpless about the challenges in the world. But do what is available to you: be an activist for your own freedom.

Commit to waking up out of the dream that makes you believe you’re wounded and small. Bring an open and loving presence to what’s happening in the world and your reactions to it. And reflect back on acceptance, compassion, wholeness, and possibility.

This is what changes everything.

When you’re freed up from the trap of the conditioned mind, you naturally become open and generous. No longer caught behind self-imposed barriers, you see love everywhere, which informs your every action.

All things in the form are an expression of the underlying fabric of universal consciousness. That’s why what you do matters to the whole—your actions and way of bringing about either more suffering and fear or more surrender into love.

This is the fierce choice that you’re actually making in every moment of your life.

Stuck in mental stories that take you away from the present moment, you’re self-focused and resistant, believing you lack what you need to be happy.

But as you see through this distorted fear-based thinking and move beyond it, you become an open vessel for the free flow of undivided consciousness. You’re available to welcome everything unconditionally in love.

The ills of the world are created by people, just like you, who make decisions after decisions from personal pride, need, lack, and fear. This is what glorifies the belief in the separate self.

Know that you are born of love, just like every other being in the universe. Live consciously as this love—as much as possible—and you are doing your part to change the world.