Some days I feel productive, like my work is highly important, while other days I feel lazy, useless, accomplishing nothing. That we are accomplishing nothing. But, in either case, as long as our consciousness does not change, nothing is really being accomplished, or is capable of being accomplished. We are running around in circles, chasing our tails, or gilding our cages.
I am a small cog in an auxiliary mechanism supporting a larger effort to achieve grand ideals, but nothing of what we are doing has any real meaning.
We can work for social justice, peace, societal change. Usually, in the best case, this means winning small victories against corrupt, racist, perfidious, unequal systems of governance that cynically abuse the powers vested in them. We win the battle, but rarely win the war. And it is not by chance that we do not succeed, because we are a part of the same consciousness that created the problems we are fighting against. We bring to the struggle the same spirit, play according to the same rules, in the same arena, and are ultimately governed by the same instincts.
In order to achieve real change we are going to need to address the problems that create the problems. And the field in which we need to work is in human consciousness. Our current state of consciousness is divisive and egocentric. It is characterized by divisions like me against the world, us against them, me and my brothers against my cousins. And we are fighting over possessions, physical or symbolic. Whether we identify with a piece of land, an ethnic group, or a set of values, it is the same. We fight over these as if they are the same. Without changing this consciousness, how can anything really change? What will our small victories ever really win for us?