As you practice, your life will change. If you practice meanness, you will find that the world around you and the world far off are getting cruel and cold.

If you practice strength, kindness and courage, your life will also change, and the world around you will appear to change, too.

If you are vain and mean, the elite of this world will appear to you to be movie stars and millionaires. It will appear to you that the world runs on ambition; that people can’t be trusted, that luck governs fortune, that fame and pleasure, money and power are great to have, and that they are mostly in the hands of undeserving others. It will seem that way no matter how rich or poor you are, how famous or obscure. Envy and dissatisfaction will goad you relentlessly.

If you practice strength, courage and kindness, and you place your achievements in the service of others, then the elite of this world will appear to be a group defined not by status or ambition, wealth or power, but by their accomplishment in service, honor and virtue. You will recognize in the crowd and in the faces of the people around you, something warm and trustworthy, something to love and admire, something to lean on when you are in need, something to protect when you can, something to emulate for the rest of your life.

Seeing the ordinary beauty of the members of this new elite, you can feel nourished in their presence, by their words and example. There will be no question of being alone in this world; you cannot be alone when you are connected through the heart to the lives of these noble beings.

As your own practice of virtue deepens, their accomplishments will become more admirable and clear to you. And at first it may seem stunning that their achievements go unrecognized and are not universally praised. But little by little it becomes clear that their reward is their action and the condition of their own life; that they are repaid in kind many times over, with every act of kindness, clarity and strength, with every move they make, every breath they take; they are with you, and you are with them. Throughout space and time, not bound by disturbance or fear, not limited by accumulation or desire, you can see this new elite make ready the means and act.

Join this elite if you can. Practice well. Guard your body against error and your mind against ignorance.

Take good care of each other.