Change, Yes We Can! (Emily Yang)

Climate change is a well-known problem existing in our world today. There are many such problems that we, as humans, must face. As gifted as we are in our ability to think, it becomes our job to make the choices that will decide our planet’s fate. Will we live in a beautiful, green world with singing birds and flowing streams? Or will we live in a dark, toxic world with nothing living and nothing natural? It is our choice. Our future society depends on us. Will we regress back to the Beige meme or transcend to the Yellow meme? To solve our problem at hand, we realize it takes the simplest things to bring our planet out of crisis. We only need spirituality, courage, and responsibility.
It seems odd that solving problems need spirituality. Don't we need the brain to analyze the problem and find a way to fix it? No! Rather, we need spirituality to bring us back to the simple way of life where we make peace with everything. The mind wants to conquer everything while the spirit wants to be with everything. This is why the second tier takes a huge jump from being against everything to survive to being one with everything – to live. The spirit, as the “Book of Secrets” says, is a coordination of acting, thinking, and feeling. Our cells live like this. Cells follow this spirituality and allow us to live. So, to survive in our environment, with our environment, we need to go to this simple way of living like our cells. Let the inside and outside guide us in the way of the “Ten Commandments of the New Age.”
A packet of Osho we were handed earlier I in the quarter told us that courage is needed when facing the new. New means change and we detest change. Al Gore tells us that the only way to fix the crisis is change, therefore we need courage. Courage is so simple; it takes courage to survive as in the Beige meme. We don’t need our mind to have courage. We need courage to admit our mistakes and right the wrong – which is us. Courage is the big step we need to take from the first tier to the second, from making war with the world to making peace, from material and mind to spirit. It takes courage to be and to change and to problem solve.
Taking responsibility is one of the first things we learn as children. Putting our own toys back, watching our younger siblings when our parents aren’t home, doing homework, etc. How does something so simple and basic contribute to problem solving? It’s because being responsible is so much more. Being responsible for a problem means having the courage to act to change the problem. A main problem with the climate crisis is that no one is willing to take responsibility for the excessive consumerism, excessive carbon production, etc. they are causing. People are pointing fingers all over the glove, making excuses because they don’t want to be responsible because being responsible means facing the problem and changing to fix it. Instead, they put their selfish, petty needs before the responsibility of caring for the planet. Why don’t they want to take responsibility, to change? Because people in power want to remain at the status quo. Responsibility is a burden. And what our planet needs the most of right now is this sense that mankind will be responsible and mankind will change.
It seems that the key to fixing our many problems is retaining the simple, inner qualities of people. It doesn’t take excessive brain power but us, to work as a community, together, to have courage, the spirituality, and the sense of responsibility to change. It seems that moving up the spiral to spirituality and oneness means down-tuning our minds. It takes the simple things to sort out the complex problems and it takes but one person, like Al Gore, to make this massive change.