Can You Change & Save the World by Changing Yourself?

This seemingly very personal work is actually among the most important things we can do to save the world, because as we become grounded in the present, we gain the power to create change.

Image by Karin Henseler from Pixabay

Then I saw that the wall had never been there, that the “unheard of ” is here and this, not something and somewhere else, that  the “offering” is here and now, always and everywhere—“surrendered” to be what, in me, God gives of Himself to Himself.

—Dag  Hammarskjöld (1905–1961), Secretary General of the United Nations 1953–1961, personal diary entry, 1954

I remember a summer when I was around five or six years old. My parents had recently purchased a hammock and put it in our backyard, and I was lying on it on a bright sunny afternoon. The sky was a deep blue, with thin wispy clouds, and I could smell the fresh-mowed grass crushed by the green-painted metal frame of the hammock. I could feel the ropes of the hammock against my back through my T-shirt and pressing against my bare legs below my shorts, and hear the melodic sounds of birds singing in the trees that surrounded the yard. One of the birds was repeating over and over a three-note call, while others chirped randomly.

I stared at the sky, noticing little specks in my field of vision and how they’d jump when I moved my eyes and then slowly settle when I held my sight on a particular bit of cloud. There was a gentle wind blowing, and I could hear it rustling the leaves of the huge old maple tree about thirty feet from me; the hammock rocked very slightly, a soothing motion that made the sky seem to tilt slightly from side to side.

I took a deep breath and noticed how breathing deeply seemed to brighten the sky, and smelled the blooming roses and hollyhocks and flowers along the edge of the yard, mingled with the fresh-laundry smell of the pillowcase on the pillow under my head. My fingers interlaced across my stomach, I felt the warmth of the sun on my bare arms, legs, and face.

Turning my head to my left, I noticed that I was 10 feet from a stand of pink, white, and yellow hollyhocks, covered with blossoms and standing 5 feet tall. The thick white stamens erupted from the waxy, colored petals, and honeybees and bumblebees moved lazily from flower to flower gathering pollen. I could hear them buzzing, as if they were humming their pleasure at finding the pollen.

As I looked at the way colors flowed from pink to white on the flower petals, noticed how the sounds of the birds had changed with the movement of my head, felt the sun now full-warm on the right side of my face, I was washed over with a sense of total Now. I saw that the flowers were alive, the bees were alive, the tree and the birds were alive, and I was alive. The air was crystal clear, and I noticed the empty space between me and the flowers, the distance between me and the grass, the next house over, and the tree. Even the empty spaces vibrated with life.

“Wow,” I said softly, then heard the sound of my own voice, and that was another miracle, amazing me all over again. It was a perfectly ordinary moment, yet filled with Spirit.

In its simplest and in its most complex forms, that is one of the most powerful forms of meditation, a touching of the presence of Life itself.

Einstein wrote about how past and present are only concepts we form in our minds but having no ultimate reality. Everything that exists and happens is only in the ever-constant now, and now is the only time that exists.

Einstein also said that he rarely thought things through with his intellect, but instead achieved his most important realizations in flashes of insight, moments of intuitive knowing. He was describing, both in his concept of time and his descriptions of how he came to see new concepts, a form of meditation.

Viewing the past

If you look back over your life, back over the years you’ve been alive on this planet, year by year and decade by decade, you’ll probably notice there’s a vast gray sea of recollection, and embedded in it are a few crystal clear moments of vivid memories.

These remembered times often seem idiosyncratic: Why would I carry around all my life the memory of an afternoon on a hammock? Or walking down the street in New York City in 1973, or sitting by a pond when I was 16, or a day in Miss Hemmer’s biology class in the seventh grade when she talked about the cycles of ATP/ADP/AMP?

What’s so special about them? Why are those memories so much more vivid than the “really important” things, the things I wanted to remember, such as how to do quadratic equations, the name of that reporter I’m meeting this week, or the directions to a place where I have to give a speech?

Sometimes, the things we choose to remember make perfect sense: who could forget their wedding, or the birth of their children, or their first day of school?

But the idiosyncratic and the reasonable memories share something in common, and that something  is at the core of the meditative state: it’s what I call presence.

If you re-examine any of those memories from your past—big or little—the one thing you’ll find they all share is that at the moment a particular memory was imprinted in your brain, you were not talking to yourself in your head. You were not thinking or worrying or imagining or comparing or judging: you were being. You had set aside the stories, and were only experiencing.

Lying in that hammock, as I felt the sun on my skin, heard the birds and the breeze, and saw the life in those flowers,  I was so shocked by the vitality and reality and aliveness of it all that I stopped thinking about it for a moment and simply experienced it. I was there, then. This sense of presence is at the core of the meditative and the mystical experience. It is the time when we are not thinking, but are instead alive and aware.

Achieve presence

Different people achieve this by different routes, but all methods have the effect of shutting down the thinking apparatus, which then allows our true consciousness to wake up and look around and see, hear, feel, taste, and smell the world.

Saint John of the Cross, for example, had a particularly difficult route to this experience. Born in 1542 in Fontiveros, a town in the Castilian region of Spain, he was the son of an impoverished weaver who was forced to convert from Judaism to Roman Catholicism. His father died when he was very young, and Juan helped support his mother by begging and working with her on her loom. Around the age of 21, he joined the Catholic order of the Carmelites and took on the name of Juan de Santo Matías.

Shortly after this time, he met Teresa of Avila, another Spanish mystic, who was trying to reform the Carmelite Order, moving them toward vows of poverty and mercy and away from the pomp, glamour, and power of the church. She was in her fifties at the time, and enlisted this young man’s aid in her reformation of their order.

Because of Juan’s support of Teresa’s reformation, he was arrested by the church and kept for a year in a cell made from a converted cupboard. There was no light most of the day, and he couldn’t stand up straight. He was not allowed to wash or change his clothes for six months, although he was infested with lice and fleas, and every day during this period of his imprisonment he was subjected to the Church’s “circular discipline.”

Daily, he would be removed from his cupboard and stripped of his shirt. Scraps of bread, a cup of water, and an occasional sardine were thrown on the floor, and as he kneeled to eat them, a group of monks walked in a circle around him, bursting the skin on his back with leather and wooden whips. They stripped the skin from his back and shoulders so many times, occasionally also breaking his shoulder and rib bones, that he was crippled for the rest of his life.

After six months of this, his lashings were reduced to once a week, lest he die from loss of blood. A new jailer took mercy on him and gave him paper and pen, and allowed the door to the cupboard to be open far enough to let in some light from the room so he could write.

It was during this time that he wrote some of his most profound and insightful works, including Cántico Espiritual, La Noche Oscura.

Consider this stanza from his poem “Sin arrimo y con arrimo” (“Without  Help  and With  Help”), about how he was touched (“helped”) by divinity even in his moments of greatest darkness:

Without help and with help
Without light and living in the darkness
Everything  consumes me. My soul  is in threads.
From  everything,  something  is grown
And uplifted  by itself
Into a life filled with ecstasy  and richness.
Only a being God helped
For that reason, it will be said, The thing I most cherish
That my soul  see itself  even  now, Without help and with help.¹

John used his privations and pain as a tool to turn off his thinking mind. In that quiet place—which he wrote about extensively in Dark Night of the Soul—he  met the love, light, and presence of pure consciousness, what he called God. It was his form of meditation.

When we understand that this—finding that quiet place within where thinking ends and consciousness begins—is the most important goal and purpose of meditation, then it’s easier to understand and use the various forms of meditation.

Nearly every spiritual tradition on Earth has developed some form of meditative practice, and each is intended to arrive at the same place. Because each practice is rooted in the culture and assumptions and traditions of a particular time and place in the world, each has a different flavor and energy.

While many books and teachers will tell you that meditation is about reducing your blood pressure or calming your jangled nerves or improving your health, those are all just side effects. They do happen, as has been confirmed in study after study, and meditation can be a powerful tool for physical or emotional healing . . . but that’s  not where its real value rests. The true power of meditation—and the reason for meditating—is to become awake in this very moment.  And from that place—that here-and-now touching of the power of life—we can find the ability to transform ourselves and others in ways that can and will transform the world.

This seemingly very personal work is actually among the most important things we can do to save the world, because as we become grounded in the present, we gain the power to create change. We also acquire and radiate a spiritual strength—the solidity and reality of spirit that tribal people have known about and used for millennia.

It’s amazing to think that it’s possible to change the world by changing ourselves, by changing the way we think, live, and experience every moment, but that’s been the core message of almost every religion in history, from the most ancient and primal to the most modern. You can change and save the world by changing yourself. And that begins with waking up to the power of life in the present, and finding there the presence of our Creator and all creation.