All you need is...

The only thing that will save the world is praise.

Love gets all the publicity, from songs ("All you need is...") to commemorative days (Valentine's Day). Gratitude is famous in its own right with people making gratitude lists and carrying stones to remind them to be thankful. Compassion has its champions in a whole tradition, the Buddhists.

Praise gets very little recognition, yet it lays the groundwork so those superstars of the emotions can flow unrestricted. Praise is like the PA that does all the hard work so the boss can get the credit, the street sweeper that makes the city sparkle, the gardener that weeds and plants and tends so the garden becomes full of beauty.

However, praise is not hard work. It involves only this: The simple appreciation of what is already in your life.

Everyone who ever did something world changing, like Christ or Mother Teresa or the Dalai Lama, knew and lived praise. They always seek to appreciate, to see the beauty in what already is here, exactly as it is, without seeking to change it. Taken to its fullest continued application like these people embody, praise becomes an experience of life as completely full, lacking absolutely nothing.

Some stop short here. They complain that praise is a way of sticking your head in the sand. They say praise is all very nice, but what about reality?

Yet which reality? Everyone lives in their own little universes. Everyone sees themselves and their world through their judgements, through their perceptions, filtered through their past experiences. Reality as it is defined here is what you make it, reality depends on the way you see what you see.

Praise, in its purity of vision, cuts through the surface differences, the surface play and allows you to experience the actual Reality of Life. Praise allows you to see how good life really is.

This is how praise will save the world: A continued choice for praise brings the recognition of the Kingdom of Heaven as being here and now. You realise the Kingdom of Heaven has always been here. It never went anywhere, only we did.

A wise man once said that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. It all begins with our choice, right now. What kind of world do you want to live in?