How to Change the World
I’m always searching for tangible ways in which we as individuals can do something to change the world. This is not an easy task. Things are so bad that most people, when looking at the enormity of all the problems facing the world, feel depressed, overwhelmed, and apathetic. They often give up, because it appears impossible to make any meaningful difference in the world.
I had another profound epiphany last night, triggered by a number of ‘coincidences’ which have happened recently. I’m still thrashing out the details, which will be posted here soon. But back to answering the question of How to Change the World.
The following article is excerpted from The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, ©1998, by Thom Hartmann. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Mythical Books. I’m including it as an important introduction to how I believe we can each play a significant role in changing the world, if we so choose.
You Do Change the World Every Day
By Thom Hartmann
Thirty years ago, I spent a few days with a renegade Sufi teacher in San Francisco. He described his notion of reincarnation, which I think is an interesting metaphorical analogy to how morphic resonance and non-locality imply that we’re all constantly changing the world.
When we die, he said, our consciousness dissolves into what he called “the cosmic soup.” All our thoughts, dreams, fears, experiences, and everything — it all goes into the soup-pot, forming “a huge cosmic goulash, with everybody mixed together with everybody else.” When a new baby is born, he said, “the cosmic cook” would pick up his ladle, reach into the cosmic soup-pot, and draw out enough of the soup to fill a human body/soul. This was poured into the new human.
It was an interesting concept, and I frankly have no strong opinion one way or another on its validity. I particularly like, however, the meaning he drew from it. “Because we all come from the same soup,” he said, “we all have an obligation to make the soup happier, lighter, better tasting. Every thought we think and every action we take will eventually become the soup, and so be poured into one of our descendants. So our actions, our thoughts, our words — even the most seemingly insignificant — are important.”
Looking at Einstein’s, Bohr’s, and Sheldrake’s work, however, the question arises: Why wait until we die to add to the soup?
In fact, all the available evidence, from physics to psychology to common sense, tells us that our actions now, today, this moment as you read this book [The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight
So where do we begin?
Practice small acts of anonymous mercy.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus pointed out that when we do “good works,” we should do them without other people knowing that we did them. This is a difficult task: you have to continually keep an eye out for such opportunities.
Many people, looking at the enormity of all the problems facing the world, feel depressed, overwhelmed, and apathetic. They often give up.
But there is great spiritual and cultural power in performing small acts of mercy. They echo farther than most people realize, and begin a “morphic resonance” process of putting out into the air — in a way that becomes culturally contagious — the millions of small steps which must be taken worldwide to save our planet and our species.
We’ve seen this over and over, in the way fads spread, jokes travel around the world, the ways that consciousness is shared. On some level, we are all connected. When you save the life of another living being — even a worm or a weed — you are putting into the air the saving of lives. Small acts of mercy are among the most transformational spiritual activities a person can engage in, which is probably why Jesus and those teachers and prophets before him repeatedly put such emphasis on them.
A Cree Native American storyteller and teacher told me:
According to my tradition, from the beginning of creation, every morning, when the sun comes up, we are each given four tasks by our Creator for that day.
- First, I must learn at least one meaningful thing today.
- Second, I must teach at least one meaningful thing to another person.
- Third, I must do something for some other person, and it will be best if that person does not even realize that I have done something for them.
- And, fourth, I must treat all living things with respect.
This spreads these things throughout the world.
For example, in most of the world’s Salem Children’s Villages (communities for abused children around the world, first started by Gottfried Muller in 1957) there are stables with horses for horseback riding. I’d known about the horses in Stadtsteinach, Salem’s German headquarters, for years: I had seen them perform dressage, had fed them, had walked to their stable and given them apples every evening with Gottfried Muller, my mentor, after dinner in the Salem guest house. What I didn’t know at first was where the horses came from.
Over time the story came out, since Herr Muller doesn’t often talk about the “good deeds” he does. He’d been in a train station and a train came through carrying horses from Czechoslovakia for the sausage factories of Germany. Seeing the horses, he inquired if it was possible to “save” any of them. The sausage company agreed to sell him a few, and those horses became the original horse population at Salem.
I’d often wondered why the Salem horses seemed to exert such a powerful attraction to both the children at Salem and visitors. Now I believe it may have to do with Gottfried Muller’s quiet action in saving their lives.
In October of 1997, 1 was in Stadtsteinach with Herr Muller over breakfast. A staunch “independent Christian” (he will join no organized religion) but fond of Christian and Jewish metaphors, he said, “You know, in the balance scale of good and evil, there is much power and weight on the side of pain and torment and evil in the world. The story of Job tells how many different powers evil has, to create wars, to make pain, to afflict people, even to create what look like miracles. But there is one ability which Satan does not have. It is an ability which only we have. And, because he does not have this ability, even when we use it in very small ways, it is a great weight for good on the balance scale of the world.”
“And what is this ability?” I said.
“Baumhertzig,” he said. It is a German word which means small acts of mercy, performed with compassion. “And, as Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount about the widow who gave a penny, it is often the smallest, most anonymous acts which create the loudest thunder in the spiritual world.”
Your actions, words, and even your thoughts have a powerful spiritual and real-world effect, whether others know about them or not. We are each like miniature transmitters, putting out into the air whatever we’re about at the moment. This is why monasteries and retreat centers and the Salem communities around the world are so important: they’re spiritual beacons, and they radiate out into the non-locality, the morphic field of the real world, the spiritual light that they’re producing.
No matter how overwhelming the problems of the world may seem, you do have an effect, even if nobody ever knows what you’ve done. For example, prayer has been demonstrated in double-blind, scientifically-controlled experiments run at Harvard University to speed healing, even when the people praying and the people healing don’t know each other, have never met, and are located in different parts of the world.
Science is proving the existence of something it once thought disproved: the living nature of the universe and the interconnectedness of all things. That in stepping back from the intrusions and distractions of our corporate-driven culture, and in reaching out to the divinity both within ourselves and within nature, we can find a power and purpose and deep meaning to life. From this place, from this new vantage-point, we can see the essential insanity of the wetiko dominator lifestyle, and when enough people figure this out, we will turn around on the destructive road humanity is now following.
But how many people need to know this?
A recent flyer I received from an organization that simply calls itself “Only Love Prevails” claims the number is a mere 80,000. They’re suggesting that people should respond to any negative event — personally or worldwide — by mentally chanting, “Only love prevails.” When I asked Victor Grey, author of Web Without a Weaver: How the Internet Is Shaping Our Future
Physicists tell us that according to the laws of wave mechanics, the intensity of (any kind of) waves that are in phase with each other is the square of the sum of the waves. In other words, two waves added together are four times as intense as one wave, ten waves are one hundred times as intense, etc. Since thought is an energy, and all energy occurs as waves, we believe that 80,000 people all thinking the same thing together are as powerful, in terms of creating the reality that we all share, as the 6,400,000,000 people (80,000 times 80,000) that will inhabit the planet around the turn of the century, in their random chaotic thought. Therefore, 80,000 people all believing only in love will be enough to change the planetary reality.
Could it be? Studies done by the Transcendental Meditation folks have demonstrated repeatedly that when a certain threshold of meditators is reached in a city, the city’s crime rates suddenly drop. (Seven percent is the figure most often cited, although some groups claim as little as one percent.)
Whatever the number, there is a synergistic effect in human interactions. The more people who think or believe a certain way, the more will find it easy to think or believe that way. The more acts of mercy performed, the more people will be inclined to act mercifully. The more people turn to searching for peace and divinity, the more peace and divinity will be found.
About the Author
Thom Hartmann’s books have been written about in Time magazine and he has been on numerous national and international radio and TV shows, including NPR’s All Things Considered, CNN, and BBC radio. He has been on the front page of The Wall Street journal twice, has spoken to over 100,000 people on four continents over the past two decades, and one of his books was selected for inclusion in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institute. A best-selling and award-winning author, he is also an occasional wood-splitter living near Montpelier, Vermont. Visit his website at ThomHartmann.com.
How Can I Change the World?
Listening to one of Neale Donald Walsch’s discussions recently triggered a new idea. You might want to listen to the first few minutes of his discussion here (up until his joke about ‘keeping it short’):
A few quotes:
What role did Group Consciousness play in the tsunami (of December 2004)? - question from a participant.
Answer from Walsch: …Given that energies create outcomes, it’s inconceivable that Group Consciousness didn’t have some effect not just on the tsunami, but all global catastrophes over the past 5 years…
If we can shift the consciousness of humanity, or a goodly number of human beings, we can change collective outcomes…. Our job is to find a technology or a way that could cause the collective consciousness of humanity to some large degree to shift. I believe the human race is open to this… is inviting it…. willing for it to occur… almost yearning for it. But looking for leadership, looking for that first domino to fall, looking for someone or a number of people to step to the line and to raise the flag and to blow the whistle and say, “This way”. That’s what we’re sorely lacking on this planet - what I call spiritual leadership, particularly in the so-called New Spirituality movement. We don’t have that spiritual leadership…. The New Spirituality movement has thus far been singularly unable to coalesce and create out of that coalescing process a team of leaders who believe as firmly in this understanding as, for example, Conservatives believe in their understanding….
One of the challenges in the world today is that the civil are not organised, and the organised are not civil. So it’s just a matter of us getting organised, and creating sufficient energy to produce critical mass.
So all we have to do is find the technology to ‘organise the civil’. And I believe that technology exists.
Using the power of the Internet, and specifically Social Networking, it should be relatively easy to speed up the process started by the World Peace Experiment, and to harness the power of Group Consciousness referred to by Walsch. A Facebook equivalent for those concerned about what they see happening to humanity.
Why not simply use Facebook itself?
Facebook was originally started for college students to share ideas and learn together. When launched to the public it immediately became popular, and is now part of the Social Networking, or Web 2.0 craze. But their popularity has meant it’s become far too crowded, and the founders are no longer able to provide the personal attention a meaningful Social Network requires. My prediction is that we will start seeing hundreds, if not thousands of Facebook equivalents springing up all over to provide niche meeting places for specific interests. As at this writing there are already 105 tabulated social networking websites.
One of the coincidences I referred to at the beginning of this article is the recent launch of a service which allows one to create these niche social websites. So, my question is, would you consider joining a Social Website focussed specifically on making the world a better place, along the lines of the World Peace Experiment? Do you believe something like this is even possible?
Update October 29: See further planning.
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