However, we need to participate and manage skillfully, helpfully, and harmoniously, for a better world, family and society to be possible. So everybody's spiritual by nature I believe, not that they necessarily have to be religious. Everybody wants, or cares about, and has values even if they don't talk about them all the time explicitly, like some noisy preachers do with their foghorn voices and dogmatic views.
Surya DasWho can keep us from recreating our life as we would like it to be-as it could, and should be? No one but ourselves can keep us from being artists, rather than marching forward like mere consumers, corporate robots, sheep. No one but ourselves can keep us from dancing with life instead of goose-stepping. In every moment recognizing our own creative imagination, the living picture we paint on the canvas of our lives. Everything is imagination. And imagination is freedom, but it can also be conditioning, bondage.
Surya DasEveryone has values, and values their family, values their health, their sanity, their safety and security, and their families, their parents, their children, their pets, their environments, well-being in general.
Surya DasEverybody has similar values. You travel around the world and everybody is different, but everybody is also the same in those ways. There's so much difference but there's so much similarity. Nobody wants to be harmed, or have their children, or their mates, or their relatives, or their families harmed, exploited, bombed, starved, dislocated, or become homeless refugees. So we're all similar in that way and spiritual life and religion is supposed to be part of the solution not part of the problem.
Surya DasI think that's what's important, to see how we ourselves can become all that we are and can be. Everybody says they want to change, but it's not that simple, it's not that easy. Who's ready to change and give up? Who's ready to get out of their rut and leave it behind, not just pour honey or syrup over their heads and over the rut? Who's ready to change and give up that rut, who's ready willing and able?
Surya Das