Strive for Freedom, for Purity, for Sacredness.

Questioner: Yeah, I had a question, because oftentimes it’s like—it’s easy to feel disassociated from these people in power and say that, you know, they didn’t get there rightfully. But at the end of the day, sometimes these people in power have such a weight over your life, society’s life. If they’re people in power, it feels demoralizing to feel hopeless that the people in power are not going to be representative or do justice to what we do. So how, as an individual, can I make an impact—to put people in power and get everyone else to put people in power that represent us?

Acharya Prashant: Create a little domain—a circle, a field of your own—untouched, uninfluenced, uncorrupted. Obviously, they are lording over entire countries and continents, and practically we know we cannot go out and fight them—that's fine. But still, we can have our own little private islands of serenity and sacredness. And we should not allow anybody to enter those places. Those should be our private temples. Small places, involving just the right kind of people, for the right purpose. And then, as you grow in your inner rootedness, you might find that circle widening. And if we can have enough number of such circles, each of them gradually widening, one day they’ll all come close and coalesce into a big upsurge of real virtue.

But you cannot start with the aim of something tectonic—"let there be a great earthquake and let me bring all these structures of authority down." You cannot start with that. You need not start with that. Start with your little thing—five people, ten people, twenty people—and keep widening, keep widening and know that.