We are taught from an early age that we are separate from everyone and everything around us.
We develop an ego, which reinforces this separateness and sets us against each other in competition and conflict.
Not just with other humans, but with the other inhabitants of our planet and even the planet itself.
This idea of separation, however, only serves to reinforce a collective lack of responsibility for our actions.
By seeing everything as separate, we can more easily pigeon hole things and deny that anything we do can have an impact on them.
Tragedies are somehow not as bad if no-one from our country has been involved in them.
We divide the world up into good or bad, friend or foe – all the time making snap judgements about people and events based on their percieved value to us.
Taken to its natural conclusion, there would be no need for compassion or love in this world.
Yet we all need to feel loved and we all are capable of giving love and showing compassion, whether we want to admit this or not.
In order to receive love, we need to be able to give it freely.
The world is as we believe it to be. If we wish the world to be a better, more loving place then it is up to us to treat others with compassion and understanding.
At our very basic level, we are all connected to everything that exists – the field of quantum physics has demonstrated this over many years.
This effectively means that what we do to others will eventually come back to us. If we treat others with love, respect and compassion we will invariably receive that in return.
If we see others as the enemy and try to control or destroy them, we will only end up harming ourselves in the long run.
Change does not come from behaving worse than those that seek to do us harm.
The world will not be a better place if we meet violence with violence, anger with anger and hatred with hatred.
It takes discipline to implement real change in our lives.
Real change only comes from doing things differently and choosing to act with compassion and love for all things, remembering that we are all connected and what we do to others today will come back to us tomorrow.