change nothing

Have you ever heard the following statement? Be the change you want in the world. That's a beautiful sentiment. But if you wrote it down, and I was your editor, I would cut the sentence down to only its first word. I would throw the rest out. Be. Period.

The biggest problem in the world is that everyone wants to change it. Change is fine as a political force, but it gets you into trouble on the spiritual frontier. In your spiritual life you have to learn not to change anything. Total acceptance is a much higher value.

Total acceptance is also very difficult. It's far more difficult than opposing things. There's no outward glory in it. There's no recognition. There is simply the expansion of humility until it sees the big picture and adores it as it is. Oh, there's happiness too.

The surprising result of acceptance of that kind is that nothing changes the world more. In fact, the strangest spiritual insight of all is that nothing else changes the world one iota. Appearances change, but the underlying issues simply resurface in a new form.

World history is one illustration after another of change amounting to bupkus. That's a yiddish word for nothing. What did Einstein say? Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? That's a statement about change.

It's also an injunction to try something else. But the something else is paradoxical. It's a major paradigm shift, which is why so few of us commit to it easily or recognize it as an option. Don't change anything. Let it all change itself by not wanting it to change.