From Crises to Consciousness
By Gurudev

The greatest opportunity for transformation as individuals and as a planet comes in moments of crisis. While times of prosperity and stability promote only superficial shifts, crisis shakes the foundation of safety and comfort we are accustomed to, calling for profound paradigm shifts.

The crisis that has come to the country has reached each individual in different ways. Whether crisis is global or personal, our reactions are always personal and based on our past. We need to see that our personal feelings and reactions to these events are a reflection of our own past experiences and provide insight into unresolved areas of our lives.

This is an opportunity to seek resolution that doesn't just come from overpowering the external enemy, but from revisiting and transforming our own distorted perceptions, dysfunctional belief systems and personal biases. We can replace them with new ways to live and act from love, light and compassion.

Become aware. Ask yourself and explore, "How does my experience of these external events represent my own personal reaction to it?" "How can I regain clarity and objectivity that can truly solve both personal and global issues that I am facing?" Before you expect external shifts in the world, let inner shifts remain at the core. Let us use that fact that we have been forced out of patterns of comfort, safety and familiarity to soften entrenched ways of behaving and thinking about ourselves, each other and the world.

Every crisis contains within it a lesson that we need to learn in order to reshape and transcend our past conditioning.. Every event that appears painful or hurtful holds within it a message that can empower us to transform the world we live in. When we avoid the experience of hurt and pain we invariably miss the message inherent within it. If each one of us misses this opportunity we miss the possibility for a change in global consciousness.

Just as the forest is made up of trees, our country is made up of individuals. Only individuals have the possibility to influence and even prevent such tragic events from reoccurring through a personal shift in consciousness. Consciousness means finding the middle path where we are free from the primal drives of anger, fear and retaliation and the belief that overcoming the external enemy will give us the internal resolution we are seeking. The middle path transcends the duality of extremism and opposites. It sees with the light of clarity, objectivity and understanding. Find that place within yourself and you will create the right response and the right action. When the critical balance shifts towards more individuals living this way, the hundredth monkey effect will bring about a change in global consciousness. It all begins and ends with each one of us.