Inner Garden

"There are rabbis that teach that each man is an ‘olam katan’, a little world, and that everything in the universe corresponds to something within man. To understand it another way, the world around us is directly affected by the world within us. To put it yet another way, to change the world around you, change the world within you. It is much easier to change the world around us for the worse than it is to change the world within us for the better, and until the world within us is better the world around us will be in bad shape. Because of this, politics is often a terrible way to fix things and often a great way to destroy things, because we ourselves do not truly understand what is good. Tending the ‘inner’ garden, attending to our church, our children, our communities, etc teaches us what is good. When the inner world is transformed the outer world will follow suit. An empire can overcome any political movement, but it cannot overcome even a single saint, and so the greater power to change the world lies within us." -from a commenter here