There's a story about Mahatma Ghandi which is one of my favorites, because it emphasizes the connection between our helping others to be healed and our personal need to be free of the same pain and suffering too.
Once a woman brought her son to Ghandhi and asked, will you please heal my son of his love for sugar? She left the boy with Ghandi and about two months later he brought her son back and said, here is your son he has been healed of his love for sugar. She asked, what took you so long? He answered, before I could heal him of his love for sugar, I first had to be healed of my love for sugar. Wholeness, completeness, balance are all different ways of expressing healing.
So often we don't realize our connection to all the people and all forms of life on earth we are to share. There is only one world and it requires what Bob Marley sang as, "one love" let's get together and make things right, in order to be whole. Our deepest drive in life is towards fulfillment and balance, peace and happiness, and it is by living that out each day respecting all that lives is the only way we will fully realize community on earth. I can see how entangled we get from my own entanglements, but I am overwhelmed by the pain I see in others who are sick and imbalanced. As well, the difficulties arising in the world today between nations and countries that don't allow for enough flexibility in supposed religious ethics to provide healthier fuller lifestyles and conditions for all will be short lived because the people won't stand for it (for example recent events in Ireland, Gaza, Israel and Europe). Unfortunately it isn't simply religious ethics that limits our flexibility, but our attachments to concepts and things that creates on a global scale the pain and suffering we see daily. Our own bodies and minds are affected by all of the other pain and struggle of others even if they are thousands of miles away from us. At the same time I see the potential for humans to cooperate and live together in peace, simply by ceasing to respond violently or negatively to our problems, for we are all in this together whether we like it or not. As Martin Luther King would say, (paraphrase) not one can be free if we are all not free.
It's amazing to see the things that can happen and become when we stop clinging to perceptions and expectations as to how we think the world should respond and be. There are more possibilities then we can imagine to respond creatively to our struggles. We can stop fighting with others and within ourselves by learning and practice mindfulness as taught in Buddhism. The students' Zen teacher told him, for many years every question the student asked the teacher's response was everything is mind. Then one day he went to the teacher and told him he finally understood that "everything was mind", the teacher then said to him "everything is not mind." (Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit, by Robert E. Kennedy, S.J.).
In relationship to our healing of the world and in it ourselves, we have to come to a deeper understanding of ourselves and change our mind by training ourselves in seeing more clearly our true nature and purpose for the journey. We will discover wonders and fears. but eventually we will experience balance (wholeness) and unity with the universe and especially our neighbors. In a lot of ways, for example, Jesus' teachings were radical because he simplified them for the common person and condensed Torah, the central teachings of Judaism, by connecting two teachings that weren't ever put together by earlier rabbis, to "love the Lord your God by loving your neighbors as yourselves." For the most part Judeo-Christian teachings have espoused these core and basic truths for thousands of years.
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