The World Awaits Understanding

To change the world. Fervently vowing to do so is the opposite of understanding the world.

"I want to change the world." Those words have a somewhat hollow ring.

I don't want to change the world; I simply want to understand it. I wish for this because a hypothesis — that change is ultimately nothing more than the result of understanding — has settled in me as a conviction.

If you try to change the status quo without knowing the structure of the world, you must pay a commensurate price.

To change the course of a river against its flow, you must cut off the current with massive concrete and sink the entire ecosystem there beneath the water.

That is a sacrifice offered to the world.

To understand, on the other hand, is nothing other than to know the nature of water, the flow of water, the terrain, gravity, and the air. Once you grasp how they relate, moving just one small stone can change the course of the river itself.

Pressure from external factors breeds resistance, and once the energy runs out, things return to how they were. But once inner perception has been updated, once something is understood, there is no going back to the old way of seeing.

Change is reversible, but understanding is irreversible.

That is why we must not look away from phenomena. The source of irreversible understanding is always right in front of us.

To understand the phenomena of the world is to read what has happened before your eyes from an appropriate point of view.

There is no need to take in complex phenomena entirely as they are.

Just as, however round the Earth may be, the ground on which we build our houses is flat.

What we need is not perfect truth. It is to grasp the world in a form people can understand, even if only locally.

By extracting premises from there, the world becomes clearer.

What moves the world is not the fierce will of one individual. When the awareness within each of us sharpens, like an image gaining resolution, and comes into focus as a single, "one and only" image, that resonance changes our actions and ends up changing the world.

Before we can even struggle to change it, the world changes from its own side as our picture sharpens.

Then when does the world change?

The world transforms at the instant someone understands one thing.

The phenomena before our eyes simply wait, quietly, for the moment they are correctly understood and recognized as a new premise.