Time For Change
Finding the way forward
“Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” Barack Obama
“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference and you have to decide what kind of a difference you want to make.” Jane Goodall
Our worldview once encouraged the myth of an infinite expansion of agriculture, trade and wealth on a finite planet.
Today, we’ve realized we share a small and finite biosphere with a delicate and balanced ecosystem that’s rapidly warming.
It’s a small biosphere and it’s alive, just like we are.
And we’re meshed into this larger aliveness, woven into its intelligence.
Mindfulness meditation helps us dissolve our thoughts and find the single conscious space that joins us into one common humanity, regardless of gender or ethnicity.
And we can also realize intuitively our fundamental connection to all life on our planet.
We’re active participants in something larger than ourselves, a conscious and intelligent Universe that’s encouraging and maintaining life in many planet biospheres throughout itself.
Our thoughts and ideas about being separate from our environment and from other people have resulted in the multiple crises we’re facing.
And it’s now beginning to seem as though there’s no pathway for a return to the old normal, and we’re going to have to work together to bring a new normal into being.
The key ingredient for making a successful transition to a new normal is inside us, rather than in the world around us.
We’re living in a rapidly changing time, and we can help bring about a world that’s more in sync with the ecosystem of our planet and more focused around social justice than previously.
And as the world transitions toward ecological and social justice, we can create a new normal, more sustainable and equitable than the one we left behind.
Surprisingly perhaps, the key ingredient for making a successful transition to a new normal is inside us, rather than in the world around us.
We need to recover the inner depth that sometimes gets lost in a busy life in the world, and find our connection into the single conscious space inside everyone.
This conscious space inside us is prior to all thought, and we can let our thoughts dissolve away and pay attention to it.
When we do this, we realize intuitively that the consciousness inside each one of us isn’t separate from the consciousness inside everyone else.
Rather than seeing ourselves as separated from each other, we can begin to realize our essential interconnection and interdependence.
The inner connection we find during mindfulness meditation helps us realize we’re always woven into a consciousness that exists throughout the Universe.
Mindfulness helps us find the intuitive guidance and inspiration and the energy and enthusiasm to bring positive change into the world.
A simple daily mindfulness practice helps us dissolve our usual and conventional view of reality, bringing insight and inspiration, as we become merged into a universal consciousness that includes all of us within itself.
And we can realize our fundamental connection with each other, rather than seeing ourselves as separated from each other and our planet.
Finding our own peace, health and well-being, helps us also value the health and well-being of planet Earth.
And this can help us bring about a green recovery, as we encourage more use of bicycles, renewable energy, electric vehicles and videoconferencing.
Whatever we’re doing in the world, a moment or two taking a focus of attention inward, helps us find guidance and inspiration, and the realization that we’re always connected into a conscious Universe and each other.
We can easily bring a mindfulness practice into our busy everyday life by adding it to a daily exercise workout:
- We can inwardly focus our attention and find an awareness of the thought-free conscious space inside us.
We’re not our thoughts, we’re the one conscious space in all of us that’s giving rise to thoughts.
Rather than seeing ourselves as separate and alone, we can begin to see ourselves as joined into one spatial conscious awareness inside all of us.
The conventional view seems to be that fundamental changes to our ways of doing things in the world are impossible or too difficult.
But the global crisis has shown us that new ideas can emerge and huge change can happen very quickly.
Some examples of fundamental change are decarbonization and localization, and both may be important drivers of renewal and defining characteristics of the new era we’re entering.
Decarbonization is already occurring worldwide as we remove the use of coal to create electricity and the use of petrol and diesel for transportation.
And localization is another emerging trend that recognizes a concern for the environment. It involves trading and delivering produce and other goods using easily accessible digital tools, encouraging local food supply, local business and local farming.
But the key ingredient for making a successful transition to a new normal is inside us, rather than in the world around us.
Finding a calm, conscious space inside ourselves every day helps us begin to see the world differently, not as something separate from our inner self but as one with it.
Helping us rediscover inside ourselves something intrinsic to our nature as human beings, something more universal than we were living with previously.
Helping us realize we’re all woven into a single spatial intelligence throughout the Universe.
All of us are participants in something larger than ourselves, a conscious and intelligent Universe, encouraging and maintaining life throughout itself.
With a daily practice of mindfulness meditation, we can make the shift from separation to wholeness every day if we choose.
We don’t have to remain all the time in our ego-oriented everyday awareness which encourages separation, when we can inwardly focus our attention whenever we have a spare moment, soften the thought boundaries around our separate sense of self, dissolve our ego slightly and become more trusting of our intuition.
Change is possible, but the most fundamental change needed is a change in our awareness, and the way we see the world, each other and our planet.
