Have the courage to change the world !
Your spiritual awakening can transform society.
Many people give up hope of seeing any improvement in our societies, let alone being able to contribute to it, faced with widespread pessimism. Yet, every personal transformation creates a butterfly effect that influences the whole world. Gandhi understood this: "Be the change you want to see in the world." Discover how your personal awakening can transform humanity.
You have probably noticed it around you. Many people point out that our societies are regressing toward less justice and freedom and more violence and poverty. Faced with a seemingly bleak future, they retreat into pursuing personal well-being or, at best, the well-being of their family or community. They see no possibility of participating in more ambitious positive change.
This pessimism is spreading like an epidemic, accompanied by increased selfishness, latent anger, and social tensions. Moreover, modern societies are seeing a growing use of antianxiety and antidepressant drugs, while calls for help to charitable organizations are multiplying. These organizations are unable to cope with the increasing impoverishment of populations.
However, if we change our perspective, we will see that we have the opportunity every day to improve the world by influencing its direction. Our impact could be decisive if we collectively develop the conditions that would enable a different society through personal change.
When personal happiness is no longer enough
Of course, we can change how we perceive and accept our existence by working on ourselves. By accepting our human condition, which is linked to duality and impermanence, we can find happiness in marveling at life's simple pleasures.
However, we cannot ignore the fact that our daily lives unfold in a society facing numerous crises that generate anxiety and antagonism. The living conditions and mental well-being of a growing number of people are deteriorating, and most no longer see politics, religion, or justice as means to achieve significant improvements.
Our legitimate efforts to build personal or family happiness will not create a society that ensures a viable future for our descendants if they lead to indifference toward others. Nor will they be enough to curb the explosion of anger and thirst for revenge of those left impoverished.
This raises an essential question: How can our personal progress toward happiness be replicated collectively ? Solutions that lead to selfish, inward-looking happiness cannot be disseminated socially, since they remain indifferent to the condition of the majority.
Gandhi was right: "Be the change you want to see in the world."
Remember Gandhi's famous quote: "Be the change you wish to see in the world." If we deeply reflect on its implications, we may begin to envision a new horizon—a strategy other than turning inward or resorting solely to protests against political decisions that upset us.
If we want our world to evolve toward greater harmony, justice, sharing, and community, we must first examine whether we embody the improvements we would like to see in society. Then, we must think about how to spread these improvements.
Gandhi reminds us of our individual responsibility and encourages us to initiate and carry out change. Most human beings would obviously prefer to live in harmonious and peaceful conditions. However, they often look for initiators of change outside their environment and elsewhere than within themselves.
Have we examined our jealousies, anger, selfishness, and resentments sufficiently ? Do we realize that our thoughts, words, and actions affect the entire world around us ?
The butterfly effect of our daily actions
Like flocks of starlings that move in a compact mass, we are all interconnected, forming a large living entity. The overall flight direction of these flocks varies at the slightest turn prompted by a few individuals. This deep interconnection means that every gesture, attitude, and thought really matters.
Little by little, at work and in your daily life, when you show an open, smiling face and adopt a calm, caring attitude, you might share moments of humanity from heart-to-heart. These small events produce peace and well-being. This positive result can inspire others to follow this path rather than one of malice or indifference.
Imagine if you considered each person your loved one and offered them the opportunity to show their best self through your loving welcome. You would create a virtuous circle. Thus, the possibility of improving the world is born by changing the general atmosphere and bringing harmony, hope, and joy.
Our societies are merely a reflection of who we are
Indeed, our societies, their failures, shortcomings, and dangers are the collective result of who we are. Of course, there are political and economic realities and accelerating crises, but aren't these consequences of the poor choices we have collectively tolerated or allowed to happen generation after generation?
Are these dysfunctions the result of anything other than our lack of awareness of our human bonds and our gradual abandonment of effective participation in our collective future over the ages? We have withdrawn into our individual needs, leaving the management of our common future to those who claim to act in the interests of the people when, in reality, they most often serve other interests.
I often reference La Boétie's 1576 book, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, in which he tells us: "The tyrant alone does not need to be fought or overthrown. He is defeated by himself, provided that the country does not consent to its servitude."
The same applies to the negative aspects of social life. Let us start by not giving in to tensions, hatred, revenge, selfishness, and everything else that causes us to suffer. We should always bear in mind that our personal qualities, combined with those of others, determine the evolution of our societies.
The story of the two wolves
Do you know the Native American story about the two wolves? An old Indian tells his grandson that he is inhabited by an inner struggle between two wolves. One wolf is filled with envy, anger, greed, arrogance, resentment, lies, superiority, and false pride. The other is good, peaceful, happy, serene, humble, generous, true, and compassionate.
The grandfather explains that this inner conflict also takes place within his grandson, as it does within everyone. The child thinks for a moment, then asks his grandfather which wolf will win the struggle. The old sage replies with an obvious answer: "Simply the one you feed."
If so many people give up on their childhood or teenage dreams of seeing violence, injustice, wickedness, and poverty end, is it not because they have relaxed their focus on these two wolves within themselves?
How can we hope for a better world and believe that we can contribute to it if we allow ourselves to be absorbed solely by the external struggle for material life? How can we believe in this when we fail to eliminate the aspects of ourselves that we are not proud of ?
Why waiting for a savior doesn't work
When we abandon our personal responsibility, we have no choice but to shift the responsibility for change onto others. Thus, during each election, we hope for the emergence of a providential man who will do the job or believe in the imminent arrival of a messiah with the omnipotence to bring heaven down to earth.
This approach never works and never will !
As long as we carry within ourselves the potential for injustice and war, there will be injustice and war outside of us ! Not even the best elected representative—the most virtuous one with the most subtle laws—will be able to prevent greedy and selfish people from plundering everything around them. No law can prevent people dominated by hatred from seeking revenge.
As long as we believe that change does not come through us, and that we must wait for a hypothetical great day, as long as we do not embrace the demanding clarity of waking up from our dreams and illusions, and begin creating the harmonious, good world we wish to see outside ourselves, generations will pass without seeing humanity's suffering diminish.
Moving away from pyramidal models
From adolescence onward, when we question societal dysfunctions, we are taught that the only solution is for the majority to adhere to a political ideology or religious doctrine. This objective always requires people to obey an elite group of individuals who are considered skilled or wise enough to make the necessary decisions.
We are locked into a mindset that considers only pyramid-shaped systems. We rarely imagine that other ways of organizing our lives together might be possible—let alone a system that would allow us to build our own rules, closely aligned with our daily reality, through benevolent and fruitful consultation.
On a smaller scale, we function in the same way as the models that structure our societies. We gather around common interests and shared prejudices, willingly lining up behind charismatic leaders. We are ready to choose sides and express our opposition to others rather than seek common ground with them.
Watch a few political debates or follow a few social networks, and you will quickly see that antagonism and slander are more prevalent than peaceful exchange and the search for conciliation. Everyone seems to be looking for an enemy to confront with a few home truths.
To break out of this vicious cycle, we must recognize the limitations that this ancestral culture imposes on our minds. We must rediscover our taste for invention and freedom !
Regaining personal sovereignty
Ultimately, it's about giving ourselves the opportunity to truly live ! It's about discovering that beyond our routines, habits, appetites, and distractions, we have the choice to evolve and transform ourselves. Our identity, ways of thinking, and concerns are not fixed.
We can choose to invest in a more intimate space within ourselves—a fertile interiority—where we can reconnect with our essence. It's as if we're giving voice to the child within us who holds other talents, desires, and wonders.
If you stop devoting all your spare time to television, social media, and other distractions, you will discover how much you are hindered by preconceived ideas. These unthought-of prejudices, emotional automatisms, and unconscious routines that you believe to be yourself are, in fact, beliefs and limitations resulting from your family heritage and the culture of your time.
Then, you will feel the desire to free yourself from these constraints and think differently about yourself and the world. You will seek other answers and insights and feel that, behind this thick veil and complex tangle of ideas saturating our brains, simpler realities exist that we have forgotten.
At certain special moments, especially when you find yourself in a beautiful place in nature and allow yourself to be silent, you will feel capable of connecting with reality differently. You sense that you are part of a greater whole, an immense living entity.
Spiritual awakening as a force for transformation
You may also experience this during meditation or when encountering significant texts that offer evidence of another life, one that speaks to infinity, beauty, love, and wonder. You then realize how many obstacles within you prevent you from accessing this greater, freer life.
These obstacles can be gradually overcome to create space for something new to awaken within us and allow our most intimate essence to resume growing and welcoming this renewal.
Those who experience this profound transformation are participating in the world's rebirth. They become a passageway through which living forces can irrigate the earth once again and offer themselves as a gift to all beings.
Each small victory you achieve by embracing the best of yourself benefits all of humanity. Your efforts to awaken and escape the pull of negativity are linked to the efforts of countless others moving toward the light. They all strengthen you.
All humans are connected as one great living entity, in which every breath, thought, word, and action affects everyone.
Building the new world
Those on the path to spiritual awakening have developed sufficient presence and self-awareness to begin changing themselves. They can see the immense distance separating our societies, torn apart by the convulsions of a sick civilization, from the new life flowing through and nourishing them.
They feel a growing closeness to all beings and a kinship of destiny that binds them to everyone. This kinship makes them perceive every failure to live up to the sublimity of human nature as a raw wound inflicted on the very body of reality. This sublimity becomes an obvious truth that compels them. They are outraged by the vulgarity and brutality humans inflict on one another, and by the overwhelming mystery of faces that so often collides with the dryness of hearts.
How can we be surprised that recourse to laws and constraints seems necessary to stem the excesses of our immense appetites and our worst impulses? How can we forget that these illusory safeguards have never improved humanity, and bring with them the permanent risk of becoming instruments of domination?
In an attempt to curb the worst of our humanity, we reduce the fluidity, diversity, and dynamism of life—that vital impulse that inhabits every being that comes into the world—by limiting ourselves to following the narrow path laid out by authorities of all kinds who are supposed to protect us from ourselves. We are often incapable of imagining the immense loss this represents and the atrophy it causes to our lives because we are so locked in a mental context that considers any other alternative impossible.
Those who gradually free themselves from this closed state of consciousness begin to glimpse this disaster—this strangulation of life—caused by all these systems of constraints. They then see it as obvious that each of their personal steps toward goodness contributes to reducing the evils from which the world suffers by reviving the power of life and opening doors to the future.
Freeing life from these constraints requires replacing all external authorities with the inner authority of love. In our current state, this love can only arise in us if we understand that attacking the integrity and happiness of others endangers our own.
Nevertheless, it is urgent to form a community with all those who share the premonition or certainty that this other path is possible. Sooner or later, we must prove it by creating an outline of society based on love and freedom. More and more people will then dare to commit themselves to the construction of this New World, seeing the end of antagonisms and the real implementation of the complementarity of human talents.
Change begins with you. It begins now.
© Jérôme Nathanaël
I am writing to open a dialogue with you, to reflect on the meaning of our presence in the world together. How can we finally establish a world of justice and love? How can we bring hope of a new world to our troubled times?
This vision is not utopian. A world in which human beings can live together in peace and joy is within our reach. Great wisdom has affirmed this for millennia, and our collective experience has taught us what doesn't work.
It is up to us to build this world together today!
If you are inspired by this vision and share this outlook, please don't hesitate to contact me directly by email. I look forward to continuing this exchange with you.
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