I recently received a note from a man named Bruce who said, in part: "It is well past the time to BE all of the changes we would like to see in our world and the task does appear to be daunting, but if we all could learn to do just our local part in the transformation, then I do think it could almost happen overnight.
"It would sure be great to wake up into a happy and pleasant world tomorrow."
To that I have this to offer: There has not been a single day in all of recorded history when humanity has been able to awaken to a happy and pleasant world. Every single moment there has been unhappiness and unpleasantness somewhere on the planet. And attempts to produce a widespread happy and pleasant life have engaged our greatest thinkers and our most ambitious leaders for millennia.
Nations have tried to do it with certain methods of governance. Communities have tried to do it with certain goals created in common. Religions have tried to do with certain ideas about God and certain rules of behavior within their membership. Political parties have tried to do it with certain platforms, programs and philosophies. Families have tried to do it with certain activities, sharings, and commitments to each other. Couples have tried to do it with certain ways of uniting in love and promises to stay in that loving and united place until the end of time.
For all of this remarkable effort, awakening to a happy and pleasant world has been exceedingly difficult to achieve. Indeed, to this date, impossible. The question is, Why?
The answer is that, with respect to Bruce, it seems to have much less to do with "all of us learning to do just our local part," and far more to do with all of us expanding our awareness of what it is, exactly, that we are trying to do. And that has nothing to do with creating a different world. It has to do with creating a different self.
The challenge is that we are an extremely young species of sentient beings, and -- even with our truly impressive physical, philosophical, educational, scientific, medical, technological, and spiritual advancement -- there is something vitally important and massively significant that we still do not fully understand about God, about Life, and about Ourselves...the understanding of which would change everything.
Do you know what it is? Would you be willing to engage in the discussion? It's a conversation we all would vastly benefit from engaging in right now.