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Page 1 of 2 Mid-week Inspiration,
Communication is a fragile endeavor at best. We do our best to make ourselves understood yet words constantly fail us. And often in the process someone gets hurt. One of the hardest things for people to recognize and remember is that change comes from within. No person can possibly make a change happen in another persons life, yet it is eminently possible to be a catalyst for change.
For the world to change people must change. This would imply that for the world to change my way I must change people to my way of thinking. For better or worse this is exactly what we cannot do. Not because we don’t want to, rather only because it is not humanly possible to change another persons way of thinking. It is possible to force a physical change in people; we can make them ‘get along’, we can with bullying force demand that they live our way. But we cannot have a lasting effect upon them through any use of force. As soon as we let up the pressure all people will revert back to their way of thinking and behaving, often swinging far from our own perception of right in the process. This is why war is and always will be ineffective as a humanitarian process. This is why there is no possibility of lasting change coming from any situation where we send soldiers to impose our will upon others. This is why children often rebel so strongly in and when they leave home and also why social upheaval frequently happens in communities. None rebel so strongly as those who feel their innate freedom to think the way they choose is being denied them. It is possible to demand that a set of rules be adhered to in our own agreed upon sovereign space (in my home there will be no smoking) as long as we ensure that we have not removed from other people space to continue to think and be themselves. In this way and by consensus we can establish peace. Even within this system peace can only be maintained through the development of space to separate and integrate ourselves according to personal thoughts and interests. This is also the intrinsic flaw in any religion that seeks to convert and establish itself as the only way. They are imposing not only a way of thinking they are also imposing what to think, they are imposing their opinions. Buddhism is the fastest growing single religion in the world today and has been for a very long time. Its growth success is attributed to its complete lack of desire to impose itself on another. It grows only by example; whether we choose or not we all hold an image of a Buddhist monk as one who is at peace with his world, this is a very attractive image particularly in a time when the closest thing we see to peace is order and conformity that contains hardly a shred of inner peace. So people embrace Buddhism even though its teaching when closely followed will incur a great deal of pain upon the follower; abstinence from just about every thing.
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