September 17, 2026
In the recent Brazilian elections, families split apart. Decades-long friendships ended. People who loved each other stopped speaking because of a choice at the ballot box. And those on both sides were absolutely certain they were on the right side. This is the most revealing symptom of polarization: the conviction that the problem always lies in the other.
We are living through a critical moment, not only in Brazil but across the entire planet. A moment of extreme polarization, amplified by social media, by climate change, by the speed at which information circulates and misinforms. Experts from different fields point out that the period from now until 2030 may be one of the most transformative in human history, redefining our relationship with work, with money, with the way we organize as a society.
Faced with this, the collective ego experiences a growing sense of urgency, as if this were the definitive moment, the hour in which everyone must choose a side and do something. But if we look more broadly, we will see that humanity has always believed its own era was the most decisive in history. Our history is a long procession of ideologies, of empires that rise and fall, of revolutions that promise everything and deliver different versions of the same patterns. Consciousness, faced with this, moves in another direction and asks: who is this in you that wants to choose?
This question deserves to be taken seriously, because an unconscious person can defend peace violently, can fight for justice full of hatred, can speak of love while destroying those who think differently, can defend democracy in an authoritarian way. The problem was never politics, but unconsciousness.
Gandhi and Martin Luther King took part deeply in public life and were political figures of enormous impact. But what made them different was not the cause they defended. It was the consciousness from which they acted. The action was a consequence of that consciousness, and that is why they have endured through the centuries.
The modern yogi does not turn politics into a new religion, nor spirituality into an escape from the world. They learn to take part without losing themselves, to act without reacting, to take a stand without needing to convince others that they are wrong. Because when activism destroys inner peace, when the cause comes to justify hatred, when the adversary stops being a human being and becomes a symbol of what must be destroyed, it is no longer consciousness that leads. It is the wounded child. And a wounded child who leads does not transform; it repeats the cycle of suffering — in a different guise, the same cycle of violence it set out to fight.
Observe what happens inside you when the topic of politics comes up. Who in you becomes indignant, needs to choose a side, to fire back, to prove they are right? If you can identify that part with honesty and without judging yourself for it, something important has already begun to move.
Consciousness produces a quality different from automatic reaction. You act intensely, but you do not react. You take part, but you do not identify with the character who takes part. You can lose an election without losing your serenity, you can watch your country go through a crisis without losing your presence, you can defend what your intelligence considers to be just without surrendering your consciousness to a flag. No ideology is greater than truth. No party is greater than love. No cause is worth losing your capacity to see the human being right in front of you.
Invitations to war are being handed out at every moment — on social media, at the dinner table, in the family group chat. You don’t have to accept any of them. Not because you are indifferent to what happens in the world, but because you have chosen to establish yourself in peace as a starting point, not as a distant destination. A single awakened person is capable of changing the atmosphere of a room, of a family, of a community, far more than a thousand people driven by hatred.
The world needs people who fight without hating, who disagree without dehumanizing, who take a stand without losing themselves. This is the most difficult and most urgent practice of our time.
Namaste,
Sri Prem Baba
