One person changing the world

Question from the Internet:

“How can one person save the world?”

There are different layers to this notion.

There is a story of a boy, who started to throw stranded starfish back into the sea from the beach that was saturated by thousands of starfish covering the shore. People asked him why he was doing such a futile action, and he replied that it was not futile to those starfish which he already managed to throw back. As a result, others started to do the same action until enough people cooperated to throw all the starfish back into the sea.

This means that by a strong, impressive positive example we can change people around us, in fact only a positive example can achieve such positive change without coercion or misleading propaganda.

The deeper layer concerns our perception of reality.

Inherently we perceive the world around us in a completely egocentric, subjective manner. We could even say that we are projecting the world around us through our own filters, coloring, animating the world according to how we see it through our — mostly negative, selfish, individualistic, exploitative — inherent qualities. Thus by changing ourselves, changing how we relate to others, changing our intention towards everything we do, we can change the world we paint, we experience.