How can we force our will, however rational and moral, on others and the world when we ourselves are in conflict and contradiction, pain and sorrow within? Perhaps then it follows that the greatest challenge is to understand the nature of our own difficulties before we can have an impact in the world outside of ourselves.
We live in fear and from that fear we are trying to run away. In running away we cannot face or understand fear. If we stop running away can we observe fear, what it is and where it comes from.
Making changes politically or socially will have no meaning if we don't understand the fear, the violence and the jealousies that we harbour within ourselves. If you feel insecure in your life because you want permanency and you cannot find it, your view of what needs to change in the world will be according to these fears and insecurities. Your escape from 'what is' is motivated on an idealised 'you' or the world where these fears and insecurities no longer appear to exist. This has no meaning for anybody else; it becomes just the exercising of your will over another. The quest to satisfy our own desires is about becoming and having something we want; an idealised future you.
Until we understand truth, love and compassion and whether they may or may not exist external to our own desires, which are driven by our fears of loneliness, emptiness, meaninglessness, rejection, hurt, death or whatever, we surely cannot approach the real problem of changing the violent and unequal world we live in and see around us every day.
There is nothing to do until one is living with awareness and an understanding which is not a conclusion, an answer, but is a moment to moment movement where yesterday is not relevant and future destinations meaningless. Doing nothing in this sense is in fact doing a great deal and this action, for it is action, is vital if we are live without the violence and destruction surrounding us and is born within us.
There is also no 'when I have sorted myself out will I know what I will do in the world'. There is only awareness, choiceless understanding and observation. Then there can be pure action. Until one can live now, without constant rationalising, comparison and analysis no action one takes will make the world a better place. As long as our conditioning and prejudices drive our actions human beings will be the same as they have been for thousands of years. To look clearly into oneself constantly without bias may reveal real change.
