In recent years, my daily social experience has unfolded not in a monastery or a meditation hall, but on a far noisier stage: social media. Through my Global Politics channel, I engage with people from many cultures, backgrounds, and levels of understanding. What I witness there is not just political disagreement—it is a mirror of the human mind in its most unobserved state.
Many conversations do not arise from knowledge, inquiry, or lived understanding. They arise from slogans. From emotional reflexes. From borrowed outrage. People repeat words as if they were truths, not because they have examined them, but because those words give them a temporary sense of belonging or moral superiority.
This is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of awareness.
The Emotional Mind Loves Certainty
The untrained mind seeks comfort, not truth. It clings to simple narratives because complexity demands humility. When the world feels uncertain, the mind looks for villains and heroes, labels and tribes. This is why slogans spread faster than understanding, and outrage spreads faster than silence.
From a meditative perspective, this is fascinating. The moment emotion takes over, perception collapses. Listening stops. Inquiry ends. The person is no longer responding to reality—they are reacting to an internal story.
Reactivity Is Not Engagement
Politics merely provides the stage. The real drama is psychological.
What many call “engagement” today is simply reactivity. A post appears, a nerve is touched, and a response is fired—often within seconds. No pause. No breath. No self-inquiry.
Mindfulness teaches us something radically different: between stimulus and response, there is space. In that space lies freedom. But most people never enter that space. They live as if compelled, as if every emotion must be expressed and every thought must be defended.
This is not freedom. This is bondage to impulse.
Knowledge Without Inner Balance Is Dangerous
I often see people demanding justice, peace, or democracy while being deeply agitated, hostile, and unwilling to listen. This contradiction goes unnoticed. They want a peaceful world but operate from an inner battlefield.
A mindful life begins with a simple realization:
the state of the world reflects the state of human consciousness.
You cannot create clarity in the world if there is chaos within you. You cannot demand wisdom from leaders while refusing to cultivate it in yourself.
The Silent Majority Inside Us
There is another dimension I observe quietly—the part of people that knows better. Even the most reactive individual has moments of doubt, moments of fatigue, moments when the slogans feel hollow. But those moments are drowned out by the noise of identity and group loyalty.
Meditation is not about adopting new beliefs. It is about dropping borrowed ones long enough to see clearly.
When the mind becomes still, something remarkable happens:
The need to be right dissolves.
The urge to attack fades.
Listening becomes natural.
A Different Kind of Responsibility
This is why my engagement with politics eventually brought me back to mindfulness. Not as an escape, but as a responsibility. If we do not learn how to sit with discomfort, complexity, and uncertainty, no system—political or otherwise—will save us.
The world does not suffer from a lack of opinions.
It suffers from a lack of conscious human beings.
From Reaction to Presence
If there is one invitation I would offer—especially to those who feel constantly triggered by world events—it is this:
Before reacting, pause.
Before posting, breathe.
Before judging, observe the movement of your own mind.
The most revolutionary act today is not shouting louder.
It is becoming aware.
Because when awareness enters, slogans lose their grip, emotions find balance, and human intelligence finally has space to operate.
And from that space, a different world can emerge—quietly, naturally, without force.