What Would You Do?

What would you do if you realized it was all up to you? What would you do if suddenly you realized that the entire evolution of the whole human race rested on your shoulders alone? What would you do?

Take a risk and let yourself go. Simply imagine. Imagine you are sitting alone on a crowded bus. You’re on your way to work. Then for no apparent reason everything becomes quiet. You are no longer able to hear any sound. All the voices around you disappear. Then it becomes even more dramatic. Now you are not able to see anything or anyone. Everything disappears. Suddenly you find yourself overwhelmed by a blazing white light. In every direction all you can see is dazzling radiance. In your ever-growing bewilderment, you find yourself being informed by an unseen presence that the evolution of the entire human race rests on your shoulders alone. Then as quickly as it came, it all vanishes. Dazed, you find yourself back on the crowded bus surrounded by other passengers on their way to work.

If this happened to you what would you do? Would you be able to avoid the overwhelming implications of a call from the Absolute? Would this realization have a profound impact on your relationship to the movement of your own mind? Would it affect your relationship to the way you feel from one moment to another? Would this shocking revelation have any impact on the way you relate to the past, the present and the future? Would your relationship to life and all of your experience change in a way that was unequivocal, or are you so lost in the drama of your own personal life that you would be able to remain the same? Indeed, would it still be possible for you to sustain the validity of a frighteningly self-centered relationship to life?

The only way for this miserable world to truly change is when the individual is willing to go beyond the personal in a way that is nothing less than heroic. Anything less will allow us to remain in a condition of always wanting only for ourselves. Like a beggar we will live a tortured existence in a perpetual state of need. This is the way most of us are willing to live our lives.

In order to be able to live up to the liberating idealism that many of us have experienced clearly at one time or another we have to be ready to assume a great burden, and that burden is the evolution of the whole. Because to ­succeed, we must be prepared to do battle with the powerful conditioning, conscious and unconscious, of the whole race. That means we have to come out from behind the shadows and be seen. Like Atlas, we have to be willing to hold up the whole world on our own shoulders. It’s an awesome task.

So if something very unusual happened to you, what would you do?