One of my favorite phenomena (I have more than a few favorites) is when I’m able to go back to something from the past and see it through the eyes of what I know now.
A recent example involves one of my all-time favorite quotes: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” This has always been something I lived by. I took it as a call to activism: If there’s something you want to be different – large or small – you can’t sit around waiting for someone else to make the change; you have to do something about it yourself.
That thought has motivated me to acts of community service and political activism for a couple decades. In the meantime I’ve also been studying the Law of Attraction, constantly refining my understand to get better and better at creating what I desire. Just the other day, the two ideas collided.
What I realized the other day – I can’t remember why this hit me, but it suddenly did – is that what Gandhi’s “be the change” really means is the same thing that Abraham, Wayne Dyer, Nneka Kelly, and my many teachers have already been telling me:
When there’s something you want to experience on the outside, you must first become it on the inside.
Holy crap, did Gandhi know about the Law of Attraction? Did he know that he knew it – is this what he was consciously saying all along – or was he so enlightened that he naturally aligned with the Universe without knowing it?
My intellect understands that wise teachers have been speaking of the order of the Universe for millenia – long, LONG before you or I watched “The Secret” or read Ask and It Is Given. It should be no surprise when enlightened masters speak Universal truths.
But there’s still that level on which our human nature is programmed to believe that nothing existed before we discovered it. Or is that just me?
Here’s the truth: In the end it doesn’t matter what Gandhi meant when he spoke back then. What does matter is that we get the message we need to know when we’re ready to know it – however it comes to us, and whether the messenger knows he’s delivering it or not.
Become what you want to create. Feel yourself experiencing it now. Be the change.
Got it. Message received. Thank you, Mahatma.