People are not at peace with themselves; how they can be at peace with the world around them? People run from the small things; how can they stop and fight against the big? People attack each other and destroy themselves; how can they recognize the true enemy or ever hope to defeat it?
There is balance to be found in every soul, between good and evil, right and wrong. It’s making peace with your monster and making peace with the fact that you can’t change the world on your own. You can be as ripples in the great ocean, but nothing more. There is peace to be fought for in our own minds before we ever begin to fight for it outside of our selves.
Until we find that inner peace; until the majority of us finds it; we will not find peace throughout our world. The confidence to make decisions without doubting them only to doubt them later when the heat is off; the knowledge of what you’re capable of and the personal choice to rise above. The thirst for knowledge and learning as much as you can at the same time as knowing the impossibility of knowing everything.
Only when such balance can be found will true enlightenment begin and pain & suffering are merely tools toward this end, neither bad nor good, but remaining in a stage where your individual choice determines the result. There are no beginnings or endings, only middles and continuations, so do not wait for the ending of something or the beginning of something, but instead act as if it is already in progress; for it is already in progress.
By giving them an example; a guiding light to bring them in to shore. They will come to see in me the things they have wished themselves to be and they will hear my stories and see my wisdom and come to wish for those things again; it will give them hope and incentive that someone else has already done the things they have done and rose above it. I’m not afraid to call my shots, because I will back them up.
The problem largely resides in how quickly people have already shifted from being impressed with me to being cautious and untrusting of me; that serves my purpose as now I can tone it down a bit and know that you all are watching me intently to see if I fuck up. It’s all strategical, emotional and logical.
I don’t expect people to be like me; I expect them to be themselves; but I do think that by watching me, people will receive incentive to try to find balance within themselves. I might be wrong. I’m going to go until it falls from under me.
Do you think that we’ll be able to institutionalize this kind of process? Specifically, can we teach this in schools? I suppose the greatest obstacle will be to find teachers who practice this mindset.
No, the institutionalization of the process is what has destroyed us every time. To force kids to learn in a set structure only makes it too rigid and unable to teach them what they need to know that they can accept when they need to know it; because they won’t always accept it until they see the practical application of it. It would call for parents and community members to actually pay attention to their own children.