In our Timeless Wisdom blog series, we feature curated articles, excerpts, and Lazaris interviews brimming with insights and ideas across topics that matter most to us.

An excerpt from “Lazaris Interviews, Book II”

You can look at the environmental issues not only throughout the United States, but throughout the world. Perhaps that is what part of the lesson of Chernobyl was about: You can’t just clean up your own environment and think that all of a sudden the world is going to be safe. Just because they closed down the nuclear plant in your neighborhood doesn’t mean that they’re going to do so around the world. That you can clean up your own environment is indeed a valuable approach. It is the place to begin — but do not fool yourself into thinking that is all you must do.

Realize that the environment is a complex issue. If you want to, you can find far too many examples to suggest that there’s no hope, there’s no solution, there are no answers. With the wilderness areas, it can seem “too late.” Many are shrugging their shoulders and saying, “It’s over.” It doesn’t have to be that way, though.

The first answer is that you need to stop blaming. Stop blaming somebody else for the problem. Westerners get together and blame the Third Worlders, and the Third Worlders get together and blame the Westerners and the Easterners. Everybody blames everybody else.

There are conferences — we’re oversimplifying it in our answer here — where people spend three-quarters of the time figuring out “who’s at fault here,” and maybe one-quarter of the time realizing “we need to find a solution,” and then everyone goes home.

If these groups would stop blaming one another, and stop deciding who’s the culprit, and who’s the bad guy, and start looking at the fact that “yes, we have a problem and let’s start Dreaming the solution,” then solutions will be found.

The second answer is to start Dreaming. We use a capital “D” on the word Dreaming, because we’re not speaking of getting daydreamy, or just wishfully thinking. We’re suggesting that you start Dreaming — Dreaming of solutions, Dreaming of answers, deciding what world you want to have. Make the decision as to what the world should look like in five years, in 10 years, at least your world personally, if not the world-at-large.

This is evidenced already. For many months we have encouraged Dreaming and Visioning. As people, individuals like you and your friends, start Dreaming — not waiting for the officials, not waiting for your bureaucrats — that solutions can be found. Start Dreaming. Stop blaming and start Dreaming. And as others around you stop blaming and start Dreaming, stop blaming and start Dreaming, it grows, it grows. Solutions can be found.

Case in point: the deforestation problem. For the first time in 10 years there is optimism. There have been conferences of the dignitaries, the “men of the world,” and some women for that matter, who are from the forest-producing nations and from the forest-using nations. For 10 years they have bickered. For 10 years they have blamed. For 10 years they’ve met, and they’ve gotten nowhere. Now for the first time, they’ve gotten somewhere. For the first time there is definite optimistic progress being made in the reforesting process. The progress was not to stop people from cutting down trees, but to teach them how to cut them down more effectively and to teach them how to replace them much more quickly. There is hope now like there never has been before.

Therefore, the assumption that all the forests are going to be gone, which might have been true in March, in April, 1987, is now different. That process has begun. Certainly it’s not the final answer, but what happened there is just what we are suggesting here: that people stopped blaming and they started dreaming, and out of their Dreaming they came up with at least beginning solutions, at least the first steps toward reforesting and toward saving the existing forests.

It’s a beginning that can expand, and it is going to spread into other areas of the environment. Not every species will be saved. There will be those that will be tragically lost and never recovered.

Release that part of yourselves that wants to find out “who did this to me,” and start realizing you have to pull together to create what we call a “synergy of decision-making” where indeed each party contributes something, and the whole that is created — the ultimate decision, the ultimate policy — is greater than any sum of the parts.  As that starts happening, solutions — simple ones, more complex ones, and then more intricate ones — are ultimately going to be found.

The environment will suffer, but it will not be destroyed. Wilderness will be appreciated, and will come back. The balance between animals and wilderness will similarly prosper and flourish. As cynical as you can become in your world, thinking that no one really cares about the gentleness of a flower (and we suggest it can look that way), when it comes right down to it, yes, you do care. You, as a human consciousness, do care and will make the difference. You will change the direction of the future. The world and its environment will be a whole lot better than the cynical part of each person would imagine it would be.

With love and peace…

Lazaris

© 1988 NPN Publishing, Inc., from “Lazaris Interviews, Book II”:
https://www.lazaris.com/shop-product/talisman-books-and-music/ebooks/lazaris-interviews-book-ii-ebook-version/

The following recording includes Lazaris discussing how to release blame:
On Releasing Anger + On Releasing Self-Pity
https://www.lazaris.com/shop-product/overcoming-obstacles/getting-unstuck/on-releasing-anger-on-releasing-self-pity/

The following Pay-per-View includes Lazaris discussing climate change:
Legacy PPV Lazaris Responds to Questions from the Community, Part 4
https://www.lazaris.com/shop-product/workshops/legacy-ppv/9374-lazaris-responds-to-questions-from-the-community-part-4/

In the following two Pay-per-Views (presented in Yosemite and Maui respectively) Lazaris discusses healing the earth:
Loving the Earth: Sacred Ceremonies for Healing Ourselves and Our World
https://www.lazaris.com/shop-product/workshops/legacy-ppv/9104-sacred-ceremonies-from-yosemite/

Congress of Magicians: Infusions of Love – Magical Workings for Healing the Earth
https://www.lazaris.com/shop-product/workshops/legacy-ppv/9327-magical-workings-maui-2006/