The Most Important Thing
September 01, 2011

Close your eyes, and tell yourself the most important thing that’s happening in the world right now is what you’re doing right here: training your mind. Everything good in the world comes out of a trained mind. Everything bad comes out of an untrained mind.

Whose mind are you responsible for? You’re responsible for this one right here, so take care of your responsibility. As for other people’s responsibilities, you can pay attention to those later.

Make sure your mind gets trained first. That’s the most important duty you’ve got because that’s going to have an influence on what you do and you say and you think.

And that’s going to shape the world around you. There’s going to be a ripple effect. Spreading out from what you do and say and think, it’s going to affect other people. Now, it may seem like a small thing but then each person has to be responsible for him or herself. You can’t go and be responsible for other people’s actions.

Even your own children: You can’t be responsible for their actions. They make their own choices. You try to influence them in the right direction. And what’s the best way to influence them? With a good example. If you act on greed, aversion, and delusion but tell them not to have greed, aversion, and delusion, your words won’t have much of an impact, won’t have any power. But if your children can see that your words come out of your actions and are in line with your actions, then those words have a lot more strength.

That’s why we say that the most important thing happening in the world right now is your training the mind right here, right now. If there’s going to be a change for the better, this is where it starts.