Consciousness is the individual finding happiness through learning, growing, and developing his spiritual being. Happiness is never going to be found chasing fun or personal indulgence. Happiness is only going to be found through taking on the responsibility of the problems in the world, because this gives you the means to grow spiritually.
If a large number of individuals found their happiness through creating solutions to the poverty and oppression in the world, a goodwill would rise up and spread across the land and around the globe like a prairie fire. The need for police and armies and their weapons would drastically reduce, crime would become extinct, and war would be a thing of the past.
The advances in technology and science continue to give us the economic boost we need to make the world right. Taxes only take twenty to thirty percent of our earnings. A comfortable living takes another thirty percent. That leaves a whopping forty percent to work with. Forty percent wasted on fruitlessly trying to attain happiness through personal indulgence. We have the means with the employment of this new consciousness, to bring peace and harmony to the world now.
There are examples all around us of individuals with, or discovering, this new consciousness. Stories in the newspapers and on television of people finding happiness through giving.
There’s the twenty-one year old college girl, who spent one spring vacation on the beaches of Cancun sipping daiquiris. She spent the next spring vacation donating her time building homes for the homeless. She said all she got was a headache on the beaches in Cancun, but building homes for the homeless she found real joy.
A man in Portland Oregon, who owns a car dealership, found a homeless man living on his lot. The car salesman helped the homeless man find a place to live, and gave him a job detailing cars. After a while the homeless man was able to rent his own apartment and get his son out of jail.
It inspired the car dealer and his wife and two kids so much; they decided to buy a four-plex. They went out and found four homeless families to move into the four-plex, and helped them get jobs. The car salesman admitted that it put him and his family a little in debt. They had to cut back on some of their personal plans and dreams. "They didn’t feel like it was a sacrifice," the car salesman said, "they grew" from the experience.
On nightline, with Ted Koppel they had a guest who had been the top brain surgeon in America. He was the highest paid surgeon in America. He was working long hours saving a child in this family, a child in that family, two or more operations a day. He had a waiting list of families wanting him to be their surgeon. Then he just quit.
He gave all his clients to other doctors, and went to the inner cities and started reaching out to black kids killing each other in gangs, and selling drugs on the street corners. He was a black man and, he said, he came from neighborhoods like that.
He told Ted Koppel he was saving one or two kids a day as a surgeon, while hundreds of kids are dying in the streets. He said there are other doctors who can do what he was doing, but nobody was doing anything about these kids dying in the drug wars.
He started off going to streets where 15 year old kids were standing around with Uzi’s. He brought a basketball with him, and he just started playing basketball. They would come and talk to him out of curiosity.
Before long they were setting their guns on the ground and playing basketball with him. Eventually he built ten gyms in ten cities and had kids, who had previously been in rival gangs, all playing basketball together.
He told Ted Koppel they listened to him because they were curious, why a guy with money would be concerned about them. He told them that society says to you, because you are a black kid born in this neighborhood you're going to join gangs, sell drugs, and fight rival gangs.
That’s what they expect you to do. They think you have no choice and no chance to do anything else. Because that’s what they expect of you, that’s what you do.
He said, he told them when he grew up in these neighborhoods, he realized that was what was expected of him, too. He decided society was wrong, and he was determined not to do that. He got a job after school, and stayed off the streets. He later went to college, then medical school, and then he became a brain surgeon. He told them they could do anything they make up their minds to do. They don’t have to live by society’s expectations. His message resonated with them.
On PBS they aired a story of an investment banker in India, who decided to try an experiment. He went to two villages in India that had always lived in poverty. He told them, even though they don’t have any collateral, or an income, or a bank account, if they could figure out a way to make an income, and pull their villages out of poverty, he would loan them the money to finance their ventures. They could pay him back when they started making an income.
The villagers took him up on his generous offer. After a few years they were able to start up income generating enterprises, and every one of them paid the investment banker back in full with interest. He said his experiment was successful as a long term investment.
On another Nightline with Ted Koppel the guest was the general for the United Nations, who was in charge of the UN forces in Rwanda when their civil war broke out. When the majority tribe went on a rampage and started massacring the minority tribe, the general was ordered to stand down.
The General was home in Canada for the interview, and he was now working with the United Nations Children’s Programs in Developing Countries. He had retired as a general.
Ted Koppel was commenting on the ex general’s lack of interest in bowling and socializing with friends, since his experience in Rwanda with all the horror he witnessed. Ted Koppel asked if the General’s happiness was one of the casualties of the war, since he no longer enjoyed the things he used to enjoy.
The General said he doesn’t bowl and socialize with friends anymore, because he has seen reality. Those things aren’t reality. Now that he has seen reality, the chaos and the suffering, he can no longer do anything except work on the reality.
His only hope, he said, is with the children of the world. He said reality hasn’t caught up with us here in the west yet. But it will, and when it does, everyone will work on the reality.