You Can Only Realize for Yourself

It’s very attractive to think of a Messiah coming and saving us because there’s a feeling somehow that’s the only thing that can work now. One can be quite depressed with so many things going wrong in the world, so many problems – you know that feeling: ‘Please let the Messiah come and straighten up the mess we’ve made.’

But we can realize that we have to straighten up the mess we’ve made in ourselves. Wanting somebody else to come and do it for us seems like a sign of immaturity. I remember as a child making a mess and then hoping my parents would come along and straighten it out and make everything right.

Hoping for the coming of the Messiah is part of that kind of thinking. It’s not that I’m against the idea; it would be very nice to have a Messiah come; I’m all for it. But I don’t demand it or even expect it because I realize that it’s more important to learn how to be your own Messiah rather than to expect some external force to come and save you or the world.

There are different ways of looking at our current situation. There’s the ‘gloom and doom’ way: ‘Everything’s hopeless! We’ve polluted the planet, and we’ve made a mess; there’s nothing much we can do; it’s too late.’ And there’s the New Age approach, full of hope: ‘It’s all changing; consciousness is changing; human beings are becoming aware of totality and the oneness of all sentient beings.’ That kind of thinking is very positive and inspiring to the mind. It gives a direction of hope and optimism to one’s life – we aren’t stuck here in a cold universal system we’ve made a mess of, where it’s just pollution and misery until the whole thing collapses.

Certainly being positive and optimistic about things will make life more pleasant, but the way out of suffering–which to me is the perfection of our existence as individual human beings–is through the realization of truth. Rather than choosing one approach and rejecting the other, both sides are seen for what they are: one is transcending and no longer identifying with the conditioned realm or expecting anything from it.

In the mind that isn’t attached, there is an ineffable understanding of truth, beyond words; it’s something you can only realize for yourself.

This reflection by Luang Por Sumedho is from the book Ajahn Sumedho Anthology, Volume 5 – The Wheel of Truth, (pdf) pp. 79-80.