If you want to change the world

(Submitted by Sadhana Gupta, India)

If you want to change the world, if you want to destroy the shadow that lies across it and make it healthy, pure and strong, you yourself must be strong; you yourself must be free from all fear. You must destroy those things which are false, unessential, which create superstition and chaos. And to do that, you yourself must be beyond the clutches of fear.

Again, you must be free from fear of convention, of what your neighbours say, which is rather difficult - much more difficult than freeing yourself from the fear of gods. Conventions are made for weaklings and weaklings are produced by conventions.

You must be able to stand alone, indifferent to companionship, indifferent to loneliness, because they do not exist. For, if you are in love with life, life has no loneliness, has no companionship. It is.

It is as individuals that you must become centres of that dynamic energy which sweeps aside all the unessentials - as individuals, not as an organized body. If you as an individual are adamant about something because you know it to be true, then you will change the world. But you cannot change the world if you are yourself uncertain.