A Quote by Dalai Lama

The creation of a more peaceful and happier society has to begin from the level of the individual, and from there it can expand to one's family, to one's neighborhood, to one's community and so on.
We can make this a more peaceful century if we cherish non-violence and concern for others’ well-being. It is possible. If the individual is happier, his or her family is happier; if families are happy, neighborhoods and nations will be happy. By transforming ourselves we can change our human way of life and make this a century of compassion.
Scripture starts with the particular and then universalizes it. You are called to love your concrete individual neighbor and then to realize that every individual is your neighbor. The point is not to destroy concrete neighborhood in a fit of universalism but to expand the local neighborhood and embrace the universal neighborhood.
If you have an all-white neighborhood you don't call it a segregated neighborhood. But you call an all-black neighborhood a segregated neighborhood. And why? Because the segregated neighborhood is the one that's controlled by the ou - from the outside by others, but a separate neighborhood is a neighborhood that is independent, it's equal, it can do - it can stand on its own two feet, such as the neighborhood. It's an independent, free neighborhood, free community.
For 40 years, my argument has been that democratizing ownership of wealth has been the key to egalitarian society and the goals of egalitarian society. But you start at the local level, both at the workplace, community and other institutions and you reconstruct the egalitarian democratized structure as well as participatory structure. And as this happens, we learn more how to move toward the vision that is much larger than just the community level.
Even though the neighborhood I grew up in had some unhealthy elements, there was a caring there where you knew that you didn't want to get caught doing something wrong. There were bright spots in the neighborhood where I felt nurtured on a community level.
In a rural society communities are "given" for the individual. Community is a fact, whether family or religion, social class or caste.
Community is another such phenomenon. Like electricity, it is profoundly lawful. Yet there remains something about it that is inherently mysterious, miraculous, unfathomable. Thus there is no adequate one-sentence definition of genuine community. Community is something more than the sum of its parts, its individual members. What is this "something more?" Even to begin to answer that, we enter a realm that is not so much abstract as almost mystical. It is a realm where words are never fully suitable and language itself falls short.
Foundations have to think outside the box and maybe expand past the usual suspects that get all of the funding and start thinking about how to reach into communities and support community healing on a more local level.
In my own mind, we are a much happier and much more functional family and a much more well balanced group of individual s both off and on the stage - in the current incarnation.
We're at a point in history were we have to become a part of the neighborhood of inhabited planets, like a neighborhood of a community, which we have not even acknowledged that that community exists up until this point.
Right now, we say in a traditional home one parent stays home with the children and the other provides the financial support for that family. That is the acceptable and right thing to do. If we begin to expand that, not only do we dilute the resources that are available, we begin to dilute things like health care, retirement, all the things offered to families that help them be a family.
Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.
That is how our nation has been built - by a partnership between citizen and government, between individual and society, between a family and the wider community.
The problem with the old ideology was that it suppressed the individual by starting with society. But it is from a sense of individual duty that we connect the greater good and the interests of the community
Sometimes we feel that one individual's action is very insignificant. Then we think, of course, that effects should come from channeling or from a unifying movement. But the movement of the society, community or group of people means joining individuals. Society means a collection of individuals, so that initiative must come from individuals. Unless each individual develops a sense of responsibility, the whole community cannot move. So therefore, it is very essential that we should not feel that individual effort is meaningless- you should not feel that way. We should make an effort.
Peace must first be developed within an individual. And I believe that love, compassion, and altruism are the fundamental basis for peace. Once these qualities are developed within an individual, he or she is then able to create an atmosphere of peace and harmony. This atmosphere can be expanded and extended from the individual to his family, from the family to the community and eventually to the whole world.
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