I couldn’t sleep early this morning and listened to a podcast on the Be Here Now network. Raghu Markus interviewed Danny Goleman (author of Emotional Intelligence) and Mirabai Bush, as they reminisced together on the early days in India with their guru Maharajaji. Danny wrote a book with the Dalai Lama called Force For Good: Dalai Lama’s Vision For Our World, written in honor of the Dalai Lama’s 80th birthday. Mirabai just started a podcast of her own, "Walking Each Other Home."

To be a force for good, the first step is to work on our inner selves by getting turmoil and destructive emotions under control, through spiritual practices like meditation. Next, the Dalai Lama outlines a vision for tough-minded compassion. He says we need transparency and accountability regarding all the corruption and collusion in the public sphere. We need to clear the dirt in politics, business and religion, get income inequality under control, heal the earth and analyze situations in order to thoroughly understand the complexity of issues confronting our world and planet. Take an overview of the challenges you’re actively attempting to change. Dialogue with people about the change you want to see in the world.

We can all do something, even if we do not realize the fruits of our actions in this lifetime.

Educating children is a major interest of the Dalai Lama. Children get selfish around age 5, when they enter a competitive “me first” environment present in most schools. Infants, for instance, have a natural strong tendency for compassion and love. Instead of mindlessly throwing children into unconscious school systems, they can be taught to harness their positive energies and direct them outwardly to be a force for good. School systems could be designed to teach empathy, ethics and self mastery.

Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama are on the earth at the same time, no small force for good. They have a correspondence with each other, and are synced to change vibratory fields to be in alignment for a better world.

We can all help move it along. OM