The
problems of the world are many. There is corruption in many places and the most
powerful are not the great and the good. What are we the ordinary people to do
with such tyranny and injustice all around us? Should we rise up with a new
system to replace the current one? How are we to do this, with aggression
because those in power do not walk away and let us take over? Would our new
system just replace the old one with another set of institutions that over time
would become as corrupt as the current ones? Is this a clue to the problem:
that to overthrow the current system does not solve the problem. So it must
follow that to try to change the current system is also not going to solve the
problem. We are not saying that change is not required; it is the awareness that change must be something other than superficial change using knowledge, which is the past, which is change that hasn't put a stop to the suffering and cruelty.
It may be
the current system is very corrupt and in the hands of a powerful few who keep
a tight reign on the rest of us but if we replaced them with ourselves without first transforming ourselves the problem would surely persist.
Let’s look
into this. Let’s say we devise a fairer system on paper and ‘sell’ it to the
population. They like the idea and if we live in a democracy we can be voted
into power. With our new power we start to change the laws to ‘fit’ our fairer
system. Those dispossessed and those who did very nicely out of the old system
would soon be fighting to stop our so called fairer laws and very soon we would
be put in the position of defending our new measures with whatever ‘democratic’
means we had at our disposal. What would be the difference between our system
and the old system? At best it would be an incremental change that might
benefit a few more people but there would be some who were dispossessed and
would want to overthrow our system just like we had done earlier.
So can we
see the problem of effecting change when we ourselves are in the same prison as
the current law makers and keepers? The walls of our prison have to come down
and once that has happened they may not be any need for talk of systems. To
change the current system with another is still from the same prison. Only when
we transform ourselves can there be real change. We have been forcing external
change for thousands of years and we are still fighting each other. Surely we
can see that external modification is unhelpful and see that what must be
required is internal transformation which does not mean rationally changing one
set of values for another and telling everyone to follow them.
The truth
is the injustice throughout the world, not the justification of what we have
got with our institutions, nationalities, religions and cultural conditioning
which continues to bread hate wherever one is.