Why is it that in a world containing so much — be it technology, sensory stimulation, and even basics such as food — people are still unhappy?  What is it that prevents a genuine and lasting sense of happiness from carrying over moment to moment, from resonating in the background of experience like harmony within the choir?

Thousands of years ago, people such as the Buddha taught that achieving a lasting sense of happiness required a reexamination of the assumptions people carry with them about the important things in life.  By letting go of things that bring us suffering — unneeded desires, negative emotions, unrealistic or unnecessary expectations — the Buddha and others taught that any person could begin a journey of spiritual discovery which would lead to a powerful state of freedom:  the state known as enlightenment.

In today’s world, a world dominated by science, spiritual questions such as these are routinely discarded or ignored.  Much of this is a reaction to any form of “religious” thought — religion being associated with the anti-science position of the Western Christian churches — but a lot of this comes from the belief that the realm of the spirit is no longer relevant in a modern consumer capitalist society.  After all, this is a world where people now obtain pharmaceuticals when they feel anxious or depressed, instead of chanting Sanskrit verses.

On the other hand, the world continues to suffer in a variety of forms.  And there continues to be a desire on the part of millions of people to seek deeper meaning to their lives.  It would be easy to label these millions of people as simply deluded; but it would be far more honest to acknowledge these spiritual urges — urges that have existed for thousands of years — and contemplate both their source and potential satisfaction.

In fact, the quest for spiritual meaning and purpose is more necessary than ever before.  We are more atomized, more alienated, and more separated from the Earth and from one another than at any other time in human history.  We see less of each other with less frequency and, more often than not, only in electronic form such as over the computer or cell phone.  We have little to no connection with the food that we purchase, the clothes that we wear, the shelters we call our homes, and the people we call our neighbors.  What we call “the family” is little more than a group of strangers who share only their genes and little else; what we call “the community” is simply a patchwork of neighborhoods dominated by parochial, corporate, or political interest.

If we have stayed sane in this environment, it is because we are better medicated, better entertained, and better controlled than our ancestors.  But let us be clear:  our world today, a world of technology and corporate domination, of the harsh individualism created by consumer culture — this world has not relieved a single person on this Earth from their need for peace of mind.  It has only increased this desire, sharpened it, and caused people infinitely deeper levels of psychic pain and discomfort that they are hard pressed to even identity, let alone acknowledge.

And so, today, we continue to suffer.  But there are real answers out there, answers predicated on thousands of years of spiritual research done by great teachers in almost every religion.  The specific doctrines vary based on the location and language of the teacher who brought the message, but the message has remained surprisingly consistent:  seek freedom in all its forms; love yourself with all your might; and if you can, pass the message along to those who might benefit from hearing it.  Three simple teachings that form the very essence of enlightenment.

Freedom, the first aspect of enlightenment.  What does it mean to seek freedom?  It means to look within and to confront the internal obstacles we put in place to our own happiness.  Political freedom, marital freedom, spiritual freedom — in any forum, in any circumstance, those who are slaves must, in some form, consent to their slavery.  This is a harsh but undeniable truth.

Today, we are the beneficiaries of thousands of years of struggle for the cause of freedom.  Great strides have been made, but tremendous journeys still lie ahead.  The frontier of freedom is vast, and we have only but traversed the gardens in front of the manor; we have yet to even leave the gate and venture outside.

Love, the second aspect of enlightenment — love of oneself first.  All too often, in every country, in every language, people seek the love they crave from the arms of another person.  But they refuse to vibrate that love for themselves.  This is a great tragedy, because happiness cannot exist without love.  Happiness is the fragrance, but love is the flower:  the flower must bloom, and then happiness is the result.

Pass it along — the third aspect of enlightenment.  It is the third aspect because it reminds all seekers of harmony that all things in this universe are interrelated, and that every individual piece of sentience contains a divine strand of the universe that resonates at the same frequency as the cosmic whole.  Just as a wave of the ocean is both separate as well as completely part of that same ocean, and resonates with that ocean, so too is every person distinct yet fully a part of the universe around him.  It is an acknowledgment of that all-too-forgotten idea that we march in solidarity with one another; that enlightenment is the birthright of all humans, and where it can be shared, and taught, without too much trouble to the teacher (see the second aspect on self-love), then it should be divulged as best as can be described.

What is enlightenment?  Enlightenment, at heart, is the recognition that the presence of the entire universe is both contained and controlled by the vibrations of any single person — the vibrations of their thoughts, their desires, and their hopes and fears.  Vibrate fear, and the universe will give you things to fear.  Vibrate greed, and the universe will give you things to be greedy about.  Vibrate hate, and the universe will give you things to hate.

But this is only half the story.  Vibrate love — the strength of self-love that comes from taming one’s fears, calming one’s anger, and relinquishing negative emotions — and the universe will be at your beck and call.  What the Buddha taught, what Mahavira taught, what Jesus taught, what every great Master has taught, is this simple truth:  love is the key to real happiness in this existence.  It is the universal vibration, the missing piece of Einstein’s field theory, and the unifying thread to every force of Nature.  Vibrate love, and the universe will give you things to love, and things to cherish, and opportunities for happiness, compassion, and peace of mind.

These teachings cannot be bought or sold, nor can they be programmed into a computer.  The sentience in our souls cannot be replicated:  peace of mind cannot be invented.  Enlightenment is the birthright of all humans — eventual and unstoppable.  But it cannot happen on its own.  All of us have much to learn while we live out the moments of our lives, but there is nothing more beautiful than the understanding that every trial, every tribulation, every challenge we have ever faced, every moment of suffering, every dark cloud that has ever blocked even one ray of sunshine — all of these things are nothing more than stepping stones to our deeper understanding of the universe, a greater capacity for love, and a widening of our conceptions of freedom:   the promise and preparation of enlightenment.

Not a physical evolution, but a spiritual evolution — a condition of perpetual learning and discovery of wisdom that comes through life experience.

What if the purpose of life was to celebrate this life experience so as to uncover deeper truths about human nature, its condition, and the universe which surrounds it?

Most people’s lives today are rudderless ships, sailing in circles without any destination and without any able crew to guide it towards any meaningful destination.  Today, there is a deep sense of aimlessness in people’s hearts, a sad recognition that this world provides little meaning other than the experiences provided by consumerism and technology.  Indeed, consumer society has provided a useful way by which some of the pressing issues that most people would grapple with in their lives — why am I here?  what is my purpose? — can be put aside in favor of temporary stimulation.

For many thousands of years, most people could not answer these questions because they were too concerned with basic survival.  Droughts, wars, sickness:  the major scourges of humankind have never been kind nor just in their tithes of human flesh.  In the 21st century, tremendous advances have been made in curing disease, ending hunger, attempting to ease the destructiveness of human conflict.  What a tremendous moment to capture something more meaningful about the human condition; yet it is precisely at this moment when such search for answers to life’s pressing questions go most unanswered.

The long historical arc of human progress is an impressive story.  For many thousands of years, people thought it was fine to own slaves, beat their wives, abuse their children, torture their enemies and conquer less powerful countries.  By and large, all of these ideas have been rejected in just the last 100 years.  This is an an amazing example of the evolution of human kind.

Tremendous progress, yes, but at the same time, evolution continues and demands further efforts.  From the perspective of a deeper wisdom, from the perspective that life is a long journey of discovery and education, it is clear that many people remain attached to social practices that are perplexing.  For example, why the need for jails?  If people have made mistakes, it seems terribly wasteful to have society build a concrete edifice, strip people off their basic needs for many years, confine them away from their loved ones, and then expect these people to either take responsibility or learn from that mistake.  The purpose of jails seems to only be to “punish,” but without an understanding of what that punishment will serve or how it will either aid the offender, the victim, or society at large.

Why the fixation on profit?  Material abundance is a wonderful thing, but as a society it seems clear we are taking the emphasis on profit to bad places.  Currently, scientists are concerned that run away economic growth is leading to global warming and the overuse of essential natural resources.  Would it not make more sense to transition to a model of sustainability in order to preserve the Earth for future generations?

Why the need for power?  In an era when people are educated on the benefits of equality and democracy, they seem surprisingly willing to accept differences in power and the breakdown of society between the “haves” and the “have-nots”.  Indeed, there remains a vast subset of the human community that subscribes to an “authoritarian mindset”:  too afraid to think for themselves, they insist on subscribing to the belief systems fed to them by the mainstream media, political leaders and even religious authorities.

The consciousness that resides in every person is energy; and energy, by its nature, is eternal as the universe.  So it is not hyperbole to simply note that within every person is an eternal spark of the universe, a spark that animates the mind, creates desires, feels emotion and learns from experience.  This energy is what is evolving.  It is consciousness itself that grows and creates ever more intricate designs, ever deeper conclusions about the nature of existence.

And when death comes, this consciousness does not simply evaporate — energy does not simply disappear.  It can only change form.  Evolution is permanent; it alters  consciousness, and because consciousness is part of this grand universe, the universe by definition must be altered as well.

Human beings are very adept at programming machines, but they oftentimes forget how much programming has been instilled in them at a young age — by parents, by elders, by society.  And, everyday, people unthinkingly execute these programs.  But instead of blindly executing, they ought to independently weigh these programs, keep the good ones, and discard the bad ones, or ones that were simply appropriate for another era.

Where does evolution take humanity?  It takes humanity to freedom.  The quest for political freedom and the quest for spiritual freedom are one and the same.  In the West, political philosophy related to freedom has been finely cultivated, while in the East one finds treatise after treatise on the pursuit of spiritual freedom.  But if a society is to be truly free, it must accept both the political and spiritual components of freedom.

Political freedom is the call of the revolutionary.  It is a spirit of energy, of action.  It is complemented by spiritual freedom, which is the call of the mystic, of the ascetic, the hermit.   This is an energy of contemplation, of meditation, and of prayer.  Action without contemplation leads to arrogance and zealotry; but contemplation without action leads to stagnation and indolence.

When humanity reaches that point where it sees life as an evolution, as an an opportunity to experience all aspects of life so as to obtain wisdom — at this moment, human behavior and attitudes will change.

At this moment, humanity will see the emergence of a respect for all things, for all forms of consciousness.  People will understand that because consciousness exists to learn, it is inappropriate to interfere with that development.  A rule of reciprocity will emerge:  in order to be allowed to learn, others must be left to follow their own path.  This requires respect for all things and the affirmation of dignity.

Because respect will be a guiding value, there will be fewer needs for laws, for government, for police.  Who needs such things when people can govern themselves?  So, spiritual evolution begets political evolution and the withering away of the state, as naturally as a snake sheds its skin, or as a flower blossoms from its root.  The law of self-reliance and self-regulation will be the governing principles of life.   This is what freedom means — the ability to live one’s live and accept the consequences of one’s own actions.

Take heart in one’s mistakes, because they are the battle scars of evolution and the only indication of spiritual growth.

Today, there is a failure to imagine a world with any type of equality — a real, profound equality of opportunity that lets people treat life as a playground for moral and spiritual development.  We treat education as an afterthought, and place emphasis solely on material wealth.   A world without a governing elite — be it a political elite or a corporate elite — is unfathomable to the worker bees who wake up every morning and trudge to work.   There is a deep acceptance, a flawed acceptance, that it is somehow appropriate for a small group of people to maintain control over the vast majority of the world.

Racism, sexism, any form of discrimination:  this is the result of this acceptance.  People today cannot imagine a world without racism, a world free of all forms of discrimination.  They cannot imagine this world because discrimination goes hand in hand with our corporate status quo.  Elitism requires that the bulk of the masses be made to attack each other, or else they overthrow the elite.  So the masses are split up into races, they are trained to hate each other based on differences that are literally skin deep; in this manner. the controlled will never think to attack their controller.  Divide and conquer.

Today, there is a failure to imagine a world with any type of democracy.  Democracy — rule of the people — requires that power be placed squarely in the hands of the people themselves; that every person is sole master of his life.  There is a failure to imagine this type of world because it requires responsibility.  It requires the acceptance that we are all individually in control of our destinies; that there is no one else to blame if we are not happy.  What a scary thought for so many people!  It is scary because then those who are unhappy will no longer be able to blame someone else for that unhappiness.  It is much easier to be a victim than to take responsibility.  It is much easier to be a slave than to take control.

As a result, in this world the people themselves permit their servitude to other forces.  They allow corporations to pay them less, they allow their money to be taken and given to bankers, they allow the deprivation of their civil liberties — because it allows them to blame the Democrats, or big government, or corporate influence.  It is much easier to blame these forces than to say, “No, this is wrong.  I will not give up my freedoms.  I will not give up my paycheck.  I will speak with other like-minded people and we will form groups and associations to challenge these policies.”  To challenge requires effort; and there is no one today willing to give effort for genuine freedom, genuine collective self-government.

Today, there is a failure to imagine a world that is based on the pursuit of happiness.  This most noble of goals, etched into the American revolutionary model, is daily discarded by the pursuit of money, by the pursuit of status, by the pursuit of blind conformity and slavish repetition of every sin of the previous generation.  We live and breathe on this Earth to be happy.  Yet few are those who can bespeak of even a handful of happy moments in their lives.  What a profound waste of human existence!  What a profound disrespect of the consciousness that pervades us.

A decade ago, the neo-conservative philosopher Francis Fukuyama celebrated the triumph of our current economic and political systems.  He trumpeted the “end of history” and concluded that the system of banking, debt, and corporatism that goes hand-in-hand with a bought and paid for system of representative government — liberal democracy — was the pinnacle of human achievement.

This is a profoundly wrong idea.  We stand not at the end of history, but at its beginning.  Before us are further millennia — and millennia after that — of human political and spiritual development that will put this period to shame.

Today, we look back at the era of master and slave and look in wonderment how people would stand to be held prisoner, how they would let themselves be treated like dirt and spit on by other people, based on silly social rules that have no inherent legitimacy.  Today, we look back at the era of lord and serf and ask why serfs would permit themselves to be tied to the land or otherwise controlled by one man who happened to have some title bestowed by a monarch that no one would ever meet.

One day, too, people will look back on this period and will have that same sense of wonder:  how we allowed ourselves to be controlled by a corporate structure, why we would ever trade our abilities to be happy and free for the chain of wage slavery, why we would use our technology to create implements of war and destruction but ignore the capacity for technology to make life easier.  They will look back on us and ask:  what was it about our television sets that kept us tied to the couch? What was it about the drugs that we took which prevented us from facing the realities of our situation?  What was it about our collective denial of reality that TODAY there exist an elite who control, and a mass who blindly follow?  They will ask all these things and they will wonder why it took so long for a people who are bestowed with a revolutionary heritage, who gave the first Bill of Rights to the world, who demanded due process, who cherished liberty, to imagine a better world with more freedoms, more happiness, more laughter, more education, more spiritual fulfillment.  Because such a world cannot exist if it cannot even be imagined.  Today, we have failed to imagine this world.

As in nature, our personal lives are in constant tension between a comfortable status quo and the challenging prospect of growth.  Growth requires tremendous energy.  It takes energy for the butterfly to emerge from the chrysalis, for the snake to shed its skin, and for the tree to plant its roots even deeper into fertile soil.   It is a comfortable thing to never have to grow; thus, for many people, the idea of growing beyond a certain framework, a certain daily routine, or a certain set of assumptions is almost unthinkable.  It is enough to have learned a single pattern and to repeat that pattern day-in and day-out for all of one’s life.

In a healthy, sane society, the greatest value is placed on education.  It is the greatest value because education challenges one’s mental boundaries and encourages growth.  Critical, open discussion in a respectful environment — such as that of a good school or university — is the best way, perhaps the only way, of exposing all sorts of people to challenging ideas about the nature of this universe in all its mysteries.

When we look with open eyes at our society, at Western educational development, we see an amazing amount of advancement in the areas of science and technology.  It is impossible to not stand in awe of the great scientific accomplishments that have been produced from ingenious minds over the last century.  Rocketry, genetics, computers — the innovation that has defined the 20th century has transformed life in almost every possible way.

But when we look at areas outside of science — areas such as ethics, politics, and mental health — we see only stunted development.  In these areas, we are no better educated than our caveman ancestors — the difference being that we are better armed.

Perhaps the most accurate measure of a society’s dedication to education is how it deals with its troublemakers.  A troublemaker is an individual who has broken a rule.  The rule could be universally condemned and serious, such as murder, or one that is more confined to a specific place and era, such as running a red stoplight or downloading a song from the Internet without paying for it.  It is an easy thing to compare contemporary societies and also societies over time to see if troublemakers are given a chance to educate themselves, or if they face some sort of brutal treatment on account of violating the rule.  Educated societies given troublemakers a chance to reform themselves and to move beyond their hurtful behaviors so as to better experience life.  In contrast, societies with no value for education favor strict punishments, where people must languish in prisons for decade, or even face torture and state murder.

In a truly educated society, rules would simply disappear.  A truly educated society would instill in its inhabitants the common sense and good behavior that we hear time and time again — using the Golden Rule and solving conflicts peacefully.  Rules would disappear because they would be seen as bulky and unwieldy to the spontaneous nature of life.  In place of rules, we would see the emergence of standards — maxims for joyful living bereft of penalties for mistakes.  Indeed, mistakes would be encouraged because they reflect new ways of thought, new approaches to old problems.  It is always ok to make a mistake; but never ok to make the same mistake twice.

In an age of consumption, people forget the purpose of life.  Instead, they cling to material possessions and tired old thinking as ways of passing the hours.  This is a deadened approach to existence that makes life a prison.  The purpose of life is to be joyful, and a way to joy is through personal growth.  Growth can be achieved through education — not only technical, but also personal, ethical, spiritual and philosophical.  Growth is achieved by looking at one’s fears and addressing them, point-by-point; by looking at areas of our lives that need improvement and taking concrete steps to improve them; by reflecting on our dreams and desires and then waking up every morning to achieve them; and by cultivating a deep well of patience, compassion, and understanding for ourselves so that we can forgive ourselves for past mistakes and regain the courage required to possibly make new ones.  With this attitude, life becomes a dream, a devoted song that reflects our creative powers and our ability to shape this existence in any way we choose.

And the most beautiful thing about life is that this growth never stops.  Our minds never stop growing, but keep insisting on deeper soils to latch onto, greater heights to emerge through.  The opposite of growth is not death, but sickness; if growth ends, our mental foliage withers and atrophies, the acuity that served us loses its edge, the spiritual force that comforted us loses its warmth and grows pale and sickly.  Growth must continue; the alternative is sickness, a withering away of health — health in its broadest sense — to a state of disease and infirmity.

The essentials of healthy living — nutrition, exercise, a robust social network and a positive state of mind — have been well known for centuries, even millennia.  Yet our current health care system has little to do with these basic building blocks.  Instead, it focuses on the consequences of unhealthy living.  For most people, health only becomes an issue when they end up in the emergency room.

A system that focuses on consequence and not fundamentals is a system that is inherently dysfunctional.  It is also a system that generates a significant amount of money.  Instead of asking why cancer develops, for example, companies can make more money by “treating” it.  So we spend hundreds of millions of dollars researching “treatments” and very little money on figuring out what causes cancer.

A system that focuses on consequence and not fundamentals also produces a horrifying perspective on the issue of aging.  Under our current health care system, we slowly but surely find ourselves confined to a bed-ridden state as the consequences of a lifetime of unhealthy living take their toll.  An unnecessary obsession with “preserving life at all costs” strips people of their dignity.  Old age becomes a hellish existence of pain and suffering, when it should be a state of wisdom and preparation for the next state of existence, whatever that may be.

Our approach to medicine treats the body as a machine to be repaired instead of a living organism that must be brought into a different homeostatic state.  The fight against disease becomes a technocratic war against the body, as medical science attempts to wipe out invaders — be it a virus, a cancer or high cholesterol — instead of employing the body’s natural ability to heal itself.

A paradigm of preventive care would begin with a primary health care provider, who would analyze a patient’s entire life situation and identify sources of potential problems well before they materialize as a physical condition.  It would take a holistic approach to wellness:  analyzing not only physical conditions but also mental and social well being.

A paradigm of preventive care would focus on diet and would help people identify those foods that are most nutritious for them.  A paradigm of preventive care would focus on exercise and help people create an exercise regimen that would keep their bodies active.  A paradigm of preventive care would focus on a person’s social network and would help that person create a vibrant community of friends and family.  A paradigm of preventive care would focus on attitude and would help a person take a positive outlook on life so that he or she could materialize their dreams and desires without needing to worry so much.

Just a few little changes in our daily lives would do much to prevent disease down the road.  Eating right, reducing levels of stress, getting exercise:  we’ve heard these things a million times, yet ignore them in favor of a health model that says, “I’ll deal with it later.”

Is it any wonder that health insurance companies are so powerful?  The current health care model, which focuses on expensive treatments, pharmaceuticals and hospital visits, produces real inefficiences in terms of human health but tremendous amounts of money for the providers of those services.  These companies are literally make a killing off of human suffering.  Real health care reform requires questioning this entire model in favor of something much more healthy and sane.

Fifty years ago, the advent of the computer was supposed to lead to the paperless office.  Today, we are drowned in more paperwork than ever before.  Similarly, the rise of social networking is supposed to make us happier by giving us better friendships and relationships, but in fact the opposite may be true.

Increasingly, the computer monitor replaces the phone call; and the phone call itself remains the stand in for a cup of coffee at the corner cafe.  There is much ado given to the freedom that comes from the information age, but no one has yet to answer what this freedom is used for or what it does to make life a healthier and more joyful experience.  

A website as popular as Facebook is a chilling reminder that for many people, image remains more important than substance in the realm of human relationships.  What is important is not the quality of a friendship, but the quantity and the number of pretty faces with whom one can claim some connection, however remote.  It would be ludicrous for any person to claim they had 1,000 friends in real life, but such numbers are common on social networking sites.

The term “friend” is now bandied about to the extent where it has lost all meaning.  The word “acquaintance” is the proper English word to define someone you interact with and even like, but just don’t know well anyone to call a friend.  A friend is someone with whom there is a life long connection, a bond forged from common experience and even common troubles; it must survive a “shock of adversity” before entitled to the term, to quote George Washington. 

It is interesting that modern technologies are so focused on vision — only one of the primary senses.  There is so much about human experience that goes beyond the visual — touch, smell, auditory stimulation — yet today people insist on using technologies that are divorced from these other sensations almost entirely.  We know what our friends sound like, their mannerisms, and could probably even recognize a familiar scent; but Facebook does not provide us with these equally valid impressions of other people.  

The atomization and alienation in American society is well documented, but it remains unclear and even doubtful whether social networking will bring people closer.  More and more, social networking presents more ominous problems related to the rise of surveillance and the breakdown of privacy in ways that are troubling to people who value the genuine cultivation of the personality.   Walt Whitman famously observed, “Do I contradict myself?   Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”  Yet it is not the inner multitude that Facebook is concerned with, but simply a uni-dimensional profile that may serve as a stepping stone towards monetizing human relationships.  

This is not to single out Facebook, but it is the most popular social networking site, and also the one which has the most trouble monetizing its platform (MySpace, by contrast, was somewhat profitable for some time prior to its acquisition by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation).  And to the credit of its users, Facebook’s more overt efforts to commoditize interpersonal relationships have been met with fierce resistance.  But Facebook is ultimately a business, and in its attempts to reap a profit, it may find itself engaging in behavior with potentially hazardous consequences.  Facebook claims that its users own their content on the site, but there is an enormous amount of intellectual property on the website that could be monetized.  How will that effect content on Facebook, and even on the internet more generally?  Are we moving to a world where uploading a picture deprives you of your right to use it after that?  If you engage in a discussion group on Facebook, does Facebook own your thoughts associated with that discussion?  These outcomes are well within the framework of current intellectual property law. 

We forget that life is nothing more than a collection of memory; and that those people who are most joyful on their death bed are those who cultivated a joyful life.  To the extent that social networking can aid in genuine human interactions, then it is a wonderful thing; but to the extent that it cheapens people and relationships, to the extent it acts only as a distraction or even as an instrument of surveillance, then people ought to be wary of what they are signing up for.  An hour with a good friend and a beer on a nice day seems far more enjoyable than writing 50 different wall posts to 50 different friends.  In person communication and all that it entailed is how people interacted for thousands of years; it is how they laughed, how they fell in love, how they argued and how they resolved their differences.  For some reason, we are eager to dispose of such a place and replace it with the cold blue glow of the computer monitor.

There is something attractive about taking up the banner of the knight-errant and fighting the demon-of-the-day allegedly holding civilization in its grip.  Moral clarity is attractive, and the demand for action inspired by any crusade provides meaning in a world where both human and heavenly action appears dictated by the rule of whim, and not by any other logic.

Thus, the seed of every crusade is the seed of fundamentalism — an unshaken belief that the cause worth fighting and dying for is noble and just.  And fundamentalism, as we are all too aware, is a tool of immense destruction.  Whatever their intentions, no one can deny that fundamentalists — of any stripe — will not hesitate to commit great acts of mischief in the name of their conviction.

The crusade is still at work today.  Every religion, every belief, every ideology has its crusaders.  They hoist their flags and build their intellectual forts, ready and eager to combat any deviation from dogma.   They leave their home countries to convince some far away people that their God or their government is the right way to do things — the only way to do things — incapable of leaving their narrow perspectives for a deeper appreciation of the diversity of human existence.  Diversity, in fact, is the enemy of the crusader; and if there are only a handful of languages spoken on this Earth today, a handful of governments, a handful of religions, a handful of people who run the banks and issue the currency — well, we can thank every crusader who has ever lived for that.

Please don’t think that I am rejecting the struggle for justice, or the quest for progress that has defined human civilization.  There are things that are wrong on this Earth that must be righted.  There is injustice, and suffering; there are people who live in physical and spiritual destitution on account of outside oppression.

And there have been many people over the millenia, genuine agents in the cause of justice, who have righted many wrongs and broadened the frontiers of human dignity.

But these stunning individuals who have furthered those frontiers were never crusaders, or fundamentalists, or moralists; these bright lights never called for the deaths of those who stood in their way, never insisted that there is only one right way to do things, never for one moment thought that it was appropriate to kill in the name of an idea.

If you look at human history, and if you trace back this history over thousands of years, you will see little more than one crusade after another — one group of people killing other people in the name of some idea.  That idea might involve God, or government, or some perceived injustice, or may even be as simple as greed for more land and resources.  But before a person can pick up a spear or a gun against another person and commit murder — legal murder, but murder nonetheless — she needs to have a reason.  A human being cannot kill for no reason alone.  The ones who do so we call sociopaths; the ones who give us those reasons we call our leaders.

The crusade cannot further justice.   Even today, in the Middle East, we reap the effects of crusades started 1000 years ago.  This is how long the effects of a crusade will last!  The crusades we have initiated today — and there have been many — will have similarly long effects.

And it is also the case that the most fervent crusaders are those who are least at peace with themselves.  This is why they feel the need to go on exotic missions with weapon (or religious book) in hand and advance their idea — they have no inner serenity unless there is some violence in their lives.  This is why Frederick Nietzsche wrote long ago, “When there is peace, the warlike man attacks himself.”  A crusader is the enemy of peace because in times of peace the crusade is over and the crusader becomes useless.

Let us examine all the crusades that exist today, crusades which we know are plowing the seeds of future conflict many years from now, maybe even a thousand years from now.  There are the countless religious crusades, too numerous to list.  There are the political crusades — democracy versus communism or socialism.  There are the crusades of the strong against the weak — the Israelis against the Palestinians, the Americans against the Afghanis.  There are the crusades against other people even in the same society — white versus black, man versus woman, the fundamentalist versus the gay couple wanting to get married.  These are not so violent, but the kernel is the same, the desire for sameness is there, the need to destroy all diversity and insist on a bland conformity that has been the dream of tyrants for thousands of years.

We have developed so much technology over the last hundred years that we forget how little our minds and hearts have changed over that same period.  To go from horse-and-buggy and sail ship to electric cars and space ship is a phenomenal feat of ingenuity.  We are so advanced when it comes to our tools.  Why then are we such infants when it comes to human decency?  Why this desire for the crusade, this desire to force our own beliefs on others even if it means blood?

The answer to that question lies inside our heads.  And so, instead of looking for answers outside, we must look inside, to our inner worlds.  The crusade must be turned inward.  Instead of fighting the outside world, instead of proselytizing and pointing a gun at someone else in the name of an idea, we must use that same urgency of purpose to confront our inner psyches.  This is the real battleground for the courageous, because it is a terrifying thing to examine our own minds.  Our minds are filled with fears and anxieties and old habits which we insist on performing day after day unthinkingly.  So many of us today drown our heads to avoid this very self-examination.  Not even one minute of silence can exist in our day or else the mind starts to shake and tremble at its own character.

But it is only here, in this inner crusade, where real peace is found, which is the kernel for world peace as well.  For so many thousands of years people have been killing each other and at each others’ throats.  And not just on the battlefield, but in marriage, in friendships, in the marketplace — please, look wherever there is any human interaction and you will see the specter of violence and tyranny at every moment.  This is how we define ourselves as a species, with behavior that would make even the most base animal ashamed because we do it in the name of an idea.  At least when a dog bites another dog, it does it out of some instinct; it does not need to come up with a reason why it had to attack.  It is only humans who are so devious with each other that they have to justify the killing of another in the name of God or country.  Even a dog has better sense than that.

And the mind itself, a thing of such beauty, never reaches its full potential.  How can it?  It is tied to an idea, like a boat moored to the dock, floating here and there but never straying far from its provincial port.  The mind is the real treasure, but it is never explored.  It is like having a treasure chest of gold in the closet in your home, but you never look inside your own house because you’re too busy outside looking for the treasure everywhere else.  The treasure is right there, the gold is right there, but it’s in the one place you never look, the one place you refuse to look because who wants to examine the mind?  So the treasure is never found.

There is injustice in this world, there is oppression, there is violence and there is suffering.   But there is never a need for any one of us to participate in those things.  If all of us were just a little more at peace with ourselves, a little more in tune with our minds and our thoughts and our motivations, we would be just a little more at peace with each other as well.  And, over time, with little improvements over our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our descendants, you would see oppression wither away, violence slowly end, and the scales of justice ever gradually right themselves.  This is the only way justice, peace, and freedom have ever come about.

It sounds like fantasy but the best way to ensure peace on the Earth is to work on peace in our own individual lives.  We make peace with our friends and neighbors, peace with our acquaintances, peace with our enemies, and most importantly, peace with ourselves.  When we have that peace of mind that comes through self-analysis, the injustices of the world take on a different hue.  Suddenly, it is no longer about us and them, which killer is right and which killer is wrong; instead, one sees that in all wars, in all conflict, in all crusades, the injustice is the mental harm and damage done to the next succeeding generation who will continue to blindly kill for no other reason than that is what they were taught.  That is the real injustice.

It makes no difference whether one side is weak and the other is strong.  The weak can triumph through peace.  This was the method of Gandhi, and never before in human history was one man so powerful as to defeat an empire.  Gandhi was but the pioneer of this technique; the method of peace has yet to be truly explored.  And its potency lies in the fact that it has nothing to do with the method of the crusade, and everything to do with truth, and justice, and freedom.  These are the real sources of power in human existence; how rarely they are utilized!

With so many problems facing the human race today — problems of war, of sustainability, of oppressive government — many men and women are beginning to feel a need for action.  It is tempting to think that by picking up the banner of an idea and marching off to battle against the enemies of that idea, solutions can be found.  But this will not work.  Please, don’t take my word for it, but simply examine the many thousands of years of history and see the bloodshed that has been produced by every idea to ever cross the mind of every well-intentioned but misguided soul who has insisted on the way of the crusade.  Make your own conclusion.

The better way — the way towards genuine human advancement — is to take that need for action and use it as a tool of self-discovery.  It is enough for every one of us to explore the universe that resides in our own heads and to come to peace with our individualities, our own psyches.  Really, that is enough.  One person does this, and just somewhere on this beautiful Earth, there is one person who has peace, who lives in perfect harmony and perfect freedom.  Than, another person finds his or her peace, and the boundaries of peace and freedom have multiplied and expanded.  Real peace!  Then two more people do this, and so on and so on and maybe there will exist one day even just one neighborhood where there is real peace and real harmony.  And that neighborhood expands into a town, and then into a city, then a state, and then maybe one day there will be one shining nation of individuals in peace with themselves and each other.

This is the way of peace, a way very different than the way of the crusade.  The era of the crusade is over.  No more crusades; it is time for peace.

Now, one or two hundred years may seem like a long time, but when compared to the thousands of years that religious fundamentalism has existed, it is really just a blink of the eye.

There will always be close-minded people who insist that they are right and everyone else is wrong.  Human nature is not set to change.  But what will change, what must change, is the grip of fundamentalism over the minds of individuals.

Whenever human consciousness has expanded, fundamentalism has declined.  The Enlightenment heralded the end of the power of organized religion in temporal affairs and the birth of reason; the American Revolution brought forth the First Amendment, which commands a separation of church and state in a manner that every democracy now strives for; and the development of science heralded the dawn of rationed inquiry into the nature of existence.

With each of these developments, fundamentalism was deprived of one of its carefully cultivated monopolies.  With the Enlightenment, fundamentalism lost its monopoly on war, and the reasons for war; with separation of church and state, fundamentalism lost its control in the realm of politics; and with science, fundamentalism was deprived of its monopoly in explaining Nature.

We stand at the doorstep of an age of yet another explosion of consciousness; a final push of thinking that will end once and for all fundamentalism’s last grip, its last claim of relevance — its explanation of God.

More and more, people are discovering that organized religion and religious fundamentalism cannot explain God.  In fact, people are increasingly discovering that these things are in fact great obstacles to true inquiry into God, true connection with God, true contemplation and union with God.

More and more, people are discovering the fact that religious fundamentalism is based in fear.  Look at any religious fundamentalist of any religion, and you will see the same fear.  People are taught to fear Hell, the Devil, reincarnation, karma, or even social ostracism.  Like all forms of control, religious fundamentalism feeds off of fear.  And anything based in fear cannot be God.  It is the opposite of God.

More and more, people are growing sick of this fear.

What will replace religious fundamentalism?  We should be clear that the replacement will not be “science”, as we conceive of that term.  We will not invent devices that will measure God, or machines that will trap angels.  Science dedicates itself to the study of measure, but God is not something that can be measured.  Measure implies observation, which in turn implies a separation between the observer and the observed.  God is a thing of unity; there is no such separation with God.

Religious fundamentalism will be replaced with personal inquiry.  Instead of pre-packaged answers, we will move to a world where people will be encouraged to inquire into the nature of God for themselves, and to reach their own conclusions.  We will move to a world where a diversity of consclusions is not only encouraged, but expected, and where respect for those conclusions will be honored.

Religious fundamentalism will be replaced with faith.  Today, faith is a faith of fear.  It is a faith that commands the blind adherence to antiquated sets of rules so as to avoid eternal punishment in an afterlife that has never been proven.  This is not really faith.  True faith is based in love.  This is a faith that rests on the foundation that life is filled with joy, that people can be decent, that kindness is the operative law of the universe, and that the forces of universalism and peace by definition necessarily triumph over the forces of division and war.  This is a faith that can see the order in the chaos, and the blessings that accrue through suffering.  It is a faith that is deeply personal and derived from experience, not from any religious text, however holy.

Religious fundamentalism will be replaced with truth.  Organized religion today is in the business of selling lies, packaged lies with bows on them that may seem pretty, but which are lies nonetheless.  Please, let us not disparage those who sell the lies — let us not doubt their intentions, which are no doubt benign.  But a well intentioned lie is a lie nonetheless.  And a business, as well, no matter how clothed with ritual and holy ordinance, remains a business.  Churches are not built without labor; and man does not eat on bread alone.  Thousands of years, thousands of religions, millions of preachers and monks and nuns in all religions — yet we live in a world consumed with war, with hatred, with disrespect, with plunder of the environment, where children are still controlled to believe the falsehoods of their parents.  Religion has not ended any of these things.  Dare I say that religion may in fact bear some responsibility?

Truth cannot come from a book.  Truth is not something that can be communicated with words from a preacher to a listener in a pew.  Truth is experience, but it is also beyond experience.  Truth is understanding, but it is also beyond understanding.  Truth comes about when a person’s consciousness resonates at the vibration of the Universal and comes to grips with a deeper reality that exists beyond the realm of our five senses.  This is something that no religion can give.

Fundamentalism will not go without a fight.  It has survived for too long and enslaved the minds of too many to simply go with a whimper.  But like all things that are composed only of shadow, the extent of its power is only as meaningful as the power we choose to give it.  Like all shadows, the flicker of even the smallest of lights will expose how transitory, illusory, and rather silly its power really is.  As individuals of all cultures and religious backgrounds awake to the true nature of reality, across all continents and languages, the nature of this shadow will be exposed once and for all.

We stand like Moses at a promontory overlooking a promised land — a land free of fundamentalism — that we may never have the opportunity to enter.  From this vantage point, it is easy to see the fertility of the land, the extent of its blessings, and its ability to provide a real sense of security born of freedom of thought.   It is a land where people can connect with this universe in their own way, on their own terms, so as to obtain genuine understanding of their purpose and the nature of existence.  It is a land where the seedlings of our consciousness will find ready soil to grow and flower in their own unique and magnificent ways.

We may never enter this land; but we can see it, and we know it is there.  And we should rest assured that our children and their children will reach ever closer to this place that is all around us, that is so close but still so far, that is always just one day away, until that moment when human beings from every corner of this fantastic planet shed their fear once and for all and enter an undiscovered country where truth, love, and beauty find ready resonance in the minds and hearts of all seekers.  This is what God is; and while some may think it ironic, it is only fitting that it is God — God — who will vanquish religious fundamentalism forever and ever.

If you are not happy on the inside, you will never find happiness on the outside.  Yet today, it is common to see people seek happiness on the outside without having done this inner work.  They seek some sort of lasting fix from something out there, somewhere.  They expect the next TV show, consumer gadget, website click or paid-for experience to provide some happiness, even when it never does.

The urge to find happiness on the outside leads to addiction and delusion.  It is possible to be addicted to anything in this world, even pain.  The root of all addiction is simply the urge to find pleasurable stimulation, to cover over the emptiness felt on the inside.  It is not possible to treat addiction without addressing this very emptiness — you have to teach the addict how to create happiness first, then the addiction will go away, naturally.

And it is possible to be deluded about anything.  So many people today are so obsessed with their religion, with their politics, with their ideas about how the world must be.  They cling to some belief system to interpret their emptiness and sense of existential anguish, to give it meaning, to give it some dignity  This is a very human thing to do, but no matter how much you dress up the empty void inside, it remains an empty void.  The fundamentalists of religion, of politics, even of science — those who refuse to question — have made this world a very difficult place for the rest of us.

I want to point out that our entire economic system today — consumerist corporate capitalism — is itself a product and reflection of this attitude that we can find happiness on the outside without doing the self-inquiry and personal work necessary to make ourselves happy on the inside.

Indeed, the entire premise of our society is that happiness can be purchased.  It doesn’t matter what it is you purchase, as long as you are purchasing something.  You could be buying a flat-screen TV, or a pet, or a year supply of Prozac.   In each instance, we make the assumption that the purchase itself leads to happiness.  That moment when cash exchanges hands, when units of money are swapped for some consumer experience or consumer item: this is the sacred moment of our society, worshipped as the sum total of human civilization.

If you want to understand the damage cause by this philosophy, all you need to do is look at the waste caused by consumerism.  Consumerism and waste go hand in hand.  Humanity has generated more waste on this planet in the last 200 years than in the last 200,000 years.  Thanks to consumerism, we have littered the world with our plastics, which scientists say carry a toxic poison.  We have created so-called “dead zones” in the ocean where life can no longer exist.  An entire island of trash, twice the size of Texas, floats between San Francisco and Hawaii.

Our need for cheap energy to fuel non-stop consumer acquisition threatens the habitability of life on this planet.  Fossil fuel emissions, air pollution, spent nuclear energy — all these things are produced because we give short shrift to the consequences of waste.  We prefer to have the luxury of cheap energy and fast cars even if it means poisoning the air quality and melting the ice caps.  There are so many evils associated with these waste products — health evils such as cancer and asthma, as well as environmental evils such as climate change — yet today, these evils are ignored.

Consumerism generates internal waste as well.  In addition to the physical garbage produced by consumerism, we accumulate mental garbage in our minds.  Short attention spans, fix-it-now attitudes about life, seeing people as worthy of respect only if they look like the people we see on TV: these are the types of mental waste we produce when we dedicate our lives to consumerism.

So we live in a world where we are told that buying things on the outside will soothe the inner void on the inside.  But this never happens.  Instead, all we end up doing is creating and living in our own waste.  Can you see how destructive this logic is, how truly brainwashed we must be to buy into the consumerist point of view?  We are so brainwashed that we cannot stop our behaviors even when they are toxic to the planet and to ourselves — even when we recognize the damage we are causing.

But let us look on the bright side.  The bright side is that more and more people are waking up to the reality that consumerism is a poison that prevents us from being happy.  More and more people are taking a holistic approach to the problems of our society — the problems of happiness, the problems of health, the problems of waste and climate change — and seeing that these problems are all linked together, linked to the very basic desire to find contentment.

Today, it is possible to talk of a world based on sustainability, and not consumerism.

What is sustainability?  Sustainability is a way of life that asks us to cultivate happiness from that which we have, instead of expecting happiness to come from that which we can purchase.

A sustainable world will look very different than a world based on consumer acquisition.

A sustainable world begins in our own minds.  Sustainability says, “what I have is enough,” and uses that foundation as a basis to do the inner work necessary to cultivate happiness.  Instead of seeing the world as a vast resource to be exploited, the attitude of sustainability seeks to live in harmony with the world and minimize human impact in order to preserve it for future generations.

A sustainable world will not be focused on the production of new consumer items.  Today, we all work to get rich, so that we can purchase things.  In a sustainable world, we will not work to get rich, but to maintain our essentials so that we can have the free time to cultivate happiness.

A sustainable world will honor mental and physical health.  Today, there are a variety of diseases that accrue due to our unhealthy lifestyle, diseases of the mind as well as diseases of the body.  Because we sit for so many hours of the day, we get heart disease later in life, and we develop cancers due to the poisons we put in the air and the earth.  Because we are constantly looking for happiness in consumer acquisition, we develop addictive and delusional traits that lead to psychosis and greater feelings of unhappiness.  A sustainable world will ask us to confront these ills, and heal them.

A sustainable world will ask us to take individual responsibility for our every day needs.  In a sustainable world, we will have to take a hand in guaranteeing our shelter, our food supply, our modes of transportation.  We will have to work with our friends and neighbors to ensure that those common necessities of life are shared by everyone, so that all can pursue their happiness in the way they see fit.

A sustainable world will have a different attitude towards technology.  We won’t use technology as a stand-in for human happiness, but we will use it as a tool in making our lives easier.

A sustainable world will be a world of peace.  Our current attitudes about acquisition play themselves out on the world stage this very moment.  What are the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, if nothing other than America’s desire to acquire stable energy supplies and greater power in this world?  No, we don’t need to acquire any of those things.  We can do with what we have.  Ninety-nine percent of the wars in this world result from a desire to acquire resources from another.  When we adopt an attitude of sustainability, we will come to see war as the disrespect that it really is, both to its victims and to ourselves.

A sustainable world is a world based on the wisdom that we cannot acquire happiness.  Happiness comes about through cultivation of the soul, through self-examination, by looking at our lives and making constant improvements so that we can feel ever closer to the grand consciousness which permeates all of existence.  If we can adopt this attitude internally, then the world will reflect this attitude as well.

The problems of the world today are the problems of unhappiness.  We are all just looking to be happy.  There is nothing wrong with this desire, but we should be critical of the methods we use to obtain happiness.  And we must discard those methods that do not in fact bring us happiness, ways of life like consumerism.

We can fix a lot of the problems of the world today with a new attitude: an attitude of sustainability.  It is a difficult thing to examine this collective way of life called consumerism which we live day-in and day-out, without thought of any alternative.  But it is a way of life that is killing us, and killing the planet, and prevents us from being happy.  It is time to think of another way.

What do you have to lose in this endeavor, other than your own misery?

Struggle is ongoing; it is ceaseless.  We wake up, and we begin our struggles.  We struggle to get out of bed.  We struggle to get to work on time.  We struggle to leave work at an early hour.  We struggle to eat a good dinner.  We struggle to have a little joy and relaxation.  Then, when we are done, we struggle to get to sleep, so that we can wake up and start struggling all over again.

We are trained to struggle.  But this was not always so.  If you know children, you will know that children do not struggle.  Children are spontaneous.  It is only adults who are not spontaneous; spontaneity has been beaten out of them.

When you see the war on this planet, and the lust for power and the quest for resources, when you see all these things, you should learn to see the struggle that has sparked them.  I don’t mean the geopolitical strategy or the economic motivations or anything like that.  You should learn to see the struggle of the individual people involved in those events, their inner psychological battles they wage against themselves every day.  It is the workings of those minds, the inner clockwork — that is the source of war and misery.  The president and the prime minister struggle internally, and then they take that struggle out on the entire world.  The person who cannot accept himself is the first person to call for war on the other.

There is a seeming paradox about existence that must be explained.  It is true that there is a universal consciousness, of which we are all individually apart of; and it is also true that there is no larger consciousness than that which is contained in our own individual minds.  Do you see this paradox?  Everything outside our minds is connected, and is one; and at the same time, there is also nothing beyond our perceptions.  Both of these things are true.

Of course, this is not really a paradox — our minds operate at the same wavelength of the universal consciousness; the two are both one and the same.  But because of the struggle, because we have been taught from an early age to dress up our egos and compete and kill each other, we have lost touch with this basic universalism, a universalism that all other nature comprehends.  The mind is the universe, and the universe is the mind; open your mind, and you will explore the universe.

This, too, you must see — the universe does not struggle.  The universe is effortless.  That is its way.  The universe is chaos, and chaos is effortless.  Yet chaos is in fact the only true order.  Again, a seeming paradox, but only because we do not yet understand.

Nature is effortless.  Anything of grandeur that Nature accomplishes results from its lack of effort.  Nature will set the stage, but it will then allow events to transpire as they will.  There is so much energy and effort in a hurricane, in a giant storm.  But it will not destroy a mountain.  On the other hand, the effortless march of a glacier, inching forward decade by decade, propelled only by its own gravity, its own inertia — this will hollow the greatest of mountains.  This is the effortlessness of Nature.

Nothing in Nature struggles against itself.  It is only human beings that struggle against themselves.  You feel shame, you feel anxiety, you feel paranoid, you feel insecure — that is the result of your struggle against yourself, your hatred of yourself, your refusal to love and accept everything about you.  The stars do not struggle or complain about their place in the universe.  It is only the human being who looks up to those same stars and laments and struggles against his or her purpose.

And when people are not struggling, they feel so worthless.  They have to constantly be busy or be amusing themselves.  They cannot face a moment when there is nothing happening, a moment in which they simply exist in that beautiful potential which accompanies all genuine periods of silence.  This is a moment of real peace, of real serenity — people cannot stand that moment.  Look at people when they are by themselves, they cannot stand themselves.  They need other people, a friend or a boyfriend or a pet or anything that will take away the utter solitude of existence.  Yet solitude is the only truth of this existence.  You are alone, just like this universe is alone.

When you put down the struggle, you can really start to listen.  You can listen to what this reality is trying to tell you.  At every moment, this unified fabric of consciousness that we call reality is constantly showing you new things about the world and about yourself.  When you start to listen, you will start to be happy, because you will come to understand more and more the paradox that you have both total control and no control over the direction of your life.  This is similar to the paradox of the universe — that it is everything, and that it is nothing as well, just a perception of your own mind.  In the same way, the universe controls everything, and you also control the universe.

This is the final mystery that must be unraveled, if you wish to be totally free.

In Daoism, it is written that when you cease to struggle, you become one with the Dao.   Lao Tzu wrote centuries ago:

If any one should wish to get the kingdom for himself, and to
effect this by what he does, I see that he will not succeed. The
kingdom is a spirit-like thing, and cannot be got by active doing. He
who would so win it destroys it; he who would hold it in his grasp
loses it.

The course and nature of things is such that
What was in front is now behind;
What warmed anon we freezing find.
Strength is of weakness oft the spoil;
The store in ruins mocks our toil.

Hence the sage puts away excessive effort, extravagance, and easy
indulgence.

God is effortless.  God does nothing with effort.  God is the rolling waterfall that falls effortless and tumbles below, roaring with the power of certainty, of collision, of both creation and destruction.  God is the ocean dancing to the beck and call of the gravity of the Moon, ever approaching and ever distancing, like two lovers who both hunger and fear the reunion of their essences.  God is the Sun, continually pulsing through countless cycles of nuclear fusion not for any other purpose than because that is its purpose, and in so doing, bathes this planet with its energies and allows life to flourish.

Something we have lost in the West is the ability to let things go, and in a fashion, to tumble with the waterfall.  Destruction is part of life.  It is pointless to struggle against those things that have already been lost.  We suffer so much because we insist on clinging to the dead, to the decrepit, to things that have outlived their usefulness.

In India, Hindus believe that the god of destruction, Shiva, lives in the Himalayas.  Shiva is a destroyer god, but destruction is not feared in Hinduism; this is why millions of people worship Shiva.  Destruction sweeps aside all the old habits, all the destructive patterns we accrue so thoughtlessly in our lives.  The force of Destruction sees the filth that we put ourselves through and washes it off of us.  It is good to wipe all that stuff away, every now and then.

When there is no struggle, there is total freedom.  You respond to events in a new way.  You create the future, and direct it to your will.  You unite once more with the universe, and the universe unites with you.  This is the Kingdom of Lao Tzu, and the Kingdom of Heaven.  It is right there, right in front of you.  But you won’t ever find it, if you struggle for it.