Mystic Mantra: How can we change the world?

For thousands of years, philosophers and thinkers, moralists and spiritualists, politicians and dictators, and even commoners, all have been trying to change the world or at least thinking to change it. What kind of change you would ask — the change that suited their way of liking or thinking. Many revolutions happened, and most of them were bloody. Most of the time, some kind of ideology and so-called religious belief was at the centre of the revolution — the ideology and the belief system that could influence the majority of people. The same keeps happening to this day and one cannot see any real change. And the change that we always see is only on the periphery. Nothing seems to be changing deep within the human psyche.

Osho illustrates this with a story of a famous Sufi mystic, Bayazid. He wrote in his autobiography, “When I was young I thought and I said to God, and in all my prayers this was the base: ‘Give me energy so that I can change the whole world.’ Everybody looked wrong to me. I was a revolutionary and I wanted to change the face of the earth.” “When I became a little more mature I started praying: ‘This seems to be too much. Life is going out of my hands — almost half of my life is gone and I have not changed a single person, and the whole world is too much.’ So I said to God, ‘My family will be enough. Let me change my family.’”

“And when I became old,” says Bayazid, “I realised that even the family is too much, and who am I to change them? Then I realised that if I can change myself that will be enough, more than enough. I prayed to God, ‘Now I have come to the right point. At least allow me to do this: I would like to change myself.’” “God replied, ‘Now there is no time left. This you should have asked in the beginning. Then there was a possibility.’” This is not the story of one man called Bayazid — it is our story. It is the story of millions of people since millennia: We want to change others with all the intensity but we don’t want to change ourselves with same intensity or any sincerity.

So nothing changes. The enlightened masters tell us to meditate over it. Osho says: “Meditation transforms. It takes you to higher levels of consciousness and changes your whole lifestyle. It changes your reactions into responses to such an extent that it is unbelievable that the person who would have reacted in the same situation in anger is now acting in deep compassion, with love — in the same situation.” He concludes: “Through your meditation, the world is not going to change, the world will be the same. But by your meditation, you will be different, and when you are different the world is different because it is your world; it depends on your vision, on your interpretation.”