Student Comment: Our role is to act in this world in a way that is in unison with the All, with Nature, with one another, with community. However, as a bus driver, I’m spewing diesel into the air; as a politician, I have to choose between TLC or non-TLC; and as a parent, I have to stay home or go out and party. To function in this world as it’s presented to us is not always a matter of just being One.
“This is a situation which requires a high level of discernment and subtlety, and an ability to work within the systems that are not geared to support an incorruptible integrity but, in fact, to challenge and undermine that at every point. And so it requires a tremendous amount of courage and strength and understanding of which battles to choose, and a knowledge that we have more freedom to move and navigate our way through this world than we pretend we have so that it is possible to find a job that actually is right livelihood, and to be part of movements or communities or activities that do support the growth of healthful nature,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. However, we have to keep in mind that we do have to work in an imperfect world and thus we will undoubtedly make imperfect decisions. “So if we try to be purists of a kind that is unrealistic and unable to live in this world, then, we fail. And so we must indeed be realists but, at the same time, we have to recognize that there is a dimension most people would think is completely nonrealistic that is a supernatural reality that can have effects that are miraculous upon this plane if we are willing to put our wholehearted energies—and synergize with others who actually have that same capacity to visualize the miraculous to change events even in the here and now, both in a microcosmic and macrocosmic level.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 27, 2010.