It is true that we all have Buddha and Hitler potential within us. We all have these capacities for becoming good, awakened, peaceful, loving people. And we also have tyranny, hatred, cruelty, and violence within us.

But here is the good news: it took a very specific set of circumstances to create Hitler. It took very specific causes and conditions that led to his life and the consequences and outcomes he created.

Hitler grew up during World War I, fighting in a brutal and senseless war. He was a sensitive artist who was violently abused and neglected. Later, he lived through the Great Depression after World War I. His people, and he himself, were humiliated on the world stage and left in incredible poverty. It was a time of great antisemitism. All of this — plus so much more that we don’t even know — went into creating this monster.

It is a fact that the universe created this monster, that under the right causes and conditions, a man like him can exist, rise to power, persuade a nation, and threaten the peace and safety of groups of people and even the entire world.

The Buddha, on the other hand, and this is proof that we live in a truly miraculous universe, did not grow up trained to be a spiritual leader, an awakened one, which is all that “Buddha” really means: the awakened one, the one who has awoken.

It is not a religion that worships a person. It is a philosophy, a science of awakening, one that merely pulls inspiration from this concept of awakening. It was followers centuries and millennia later who changed his name from Gautama to “the Buddha” and began to worship him. But it is merely the ideal of human beings reaching their full potential.

Gautama Buddha grew up raised to be a prince. He was pampered, never having to lift a finger, with every physical desire met on demand. If anything, he was trained to become a spoiled tyrant, addicted to all the pleasures life has to offer — including that most alluring one of power, which not many of us, except princes like Gautama, are able to indulge in.

But instead of living the life of a prince and becoming king, he left it all in the middle of the night. He snuck out after fulfilling his princely duty of providing an heir to the throne. He left in order to find the true cause of human suffering and its cure.

The seven-year journey he went on was not to fulfill what he had been conditioned to do. It was to uncondition his mind, to unlearn his habits and beliefs about himself, to disidentify from who he was told he was, and to truly understand who he was at the deepest level.

So while we may all be 0.000000001% Hitler because of the possibility of living through specific conditions that could lead us there, Buddha is who we truly are underneath all of the illusions.

When we peel back the layers we’ve accumulated over our lifetime — our family history, our society’s culture, our genetic memory — we come to the same conclusion: that one life underneath, free from habits, free from mental patterns.

We no longer identify with the thoughts, desires, or hatred we have become accustomed to and identified with. We become that pure, expanded consciousness — free from our pasts, our beliefs, free from any identity tied to a separate self.

We become that one consciousness underneath that connects all of us, revealing nothing but pure love, which is ultimately that connection, recognizing the other as the self and the self as the other.

Hitler was one man created from a very specific set of circumstances. The Buddha is simply the awakened one — the potential in all of us. Not a person, but a state of consciousness we can all achieve, no matter what causes and conditions we have been subjected to.

The law of nature states that whatever we nurture multiplies.

If we plant an apple seed, an apple tree will grow, producing many apples, each with many seeds. So too, if we act on our negative thoughts, our hateful thoughts, if we become cruel and violent, we multiply the cruelty and violence within us and it expands.

But if we nurture compassion, presence, and the awareness of our thoughts without reacting to them or identifying with them, those qualities multiply exponentially.

It took Buddha seven years to come to these realizations. But it won’t take us seven years if we commit ourselves, because he found the way for us.

And you don’t have to be a Buddhist. He certainly didn’t want to be worshiped. The teachings are there across many groups, religions, sexes, backgrounds, sciences, and philosophies because wisdom is universal.

These tools have been left to us through countless generations and cultures. They work for a Buddhist as much as they work for an atheist, a Christian, a Jew, or a Muslim. They are as much a fundamental law of nature as any other.

Every inkling of suffering that we humans face naturally pulls us toward these teachings that alleviate suffering. They pull us toward awakening. And that is the state of being humans are moving toward. It is natural. It is inevitable.

Life is eternal.

Just like our bodies decay, grow old, and age, life continues to go on. Life is eternal. It is evolving and becoming wiser and more complex.

In our lifetime, there will be highs and lows. But over time, human potential is evolving. And I don’t just mean in a scientific evolutionary way, we can see it in civilization. We can see it throughout the history of mankind: how we have become more peaceful, more aware, more awakened, more conscientious, more fair, more free, more safe, more compassionate.

This is why there is never cause to doubt, to worry, to fear, or to panic. Yes, there will be ups and downs. But that is the journey up any mountain. Sometimes you have to go down before you can go back up. It’s not straight up the whole way.

Overall, this world is becoming more peaceful. Needless deaths are at an all-time low. The quality of the average human diet is better than at any time in history. And technologically speaking, we are at a time when we can combine modern knowledge with ancient wisdom.

We are in a time of rapid change as we’ve never seen. And anytime there is growth, there are growing pains. But those are signs of evolution, of improvement.

We can be grateful for those pains of change because they mean we are figuring it out. We are not complacent and accepting the old ways that weren’t working for everybody.

As a species, we are nourishing and nurturing the realization of our true identity, that oneness of consciousness that underlies all living beings, and it is multiplying at an exponential rate.

I was recently watching the trailer for the new Superman movie coming out in July. I’m a big Superman fan. I love the modern mythology comic books give us, these beautiful stories of morality and hero’s journeys that we can look up to and emulate.

There’s a scene in the trailer where Lois Lane is interviewing Superman. She says, “You’re being investigated for your actions.” And he says, “My actions? I stopped a war.” She says, “You entered a foreign country without permission.”

And he stands up and shouts, “People were going to die.”

I love that line because humanity has complicated something so simple: when someone innocent is about to die — a civilian, a child — they don’t care about geopolitical implications or restrictions. They just want someone to save them. Like we all do.

We don’t have a Superman who can protect all the innocents and stop all wars. But we can nurture that spark of awareness, the awareness of oneness.

We can nourish compassion, love, and peace. We can witness impulses toward anger, hatred, and violence without reacting to them, so they wither away like a seed that never receives soil, water, nutrients, or sun.

We can break cycles of generational trauma, abuse, violence, and cruelty. We can unlearn what no longer serves us.

We can move beyond tribes that were once necessary when we were isolated, surrounded by real dangers. We no longer live in that disconnected world. We can create a new way forward where identifying with each other as one leads to true safety, peace, and security now and in the future. We know human behavior. Violence creates more violence. Hatred creates more hatred.

There are only two options: either violence continues until one person is left standing, alone — or we come together. We drop grudges. We forgive the past. We build a society of mutual cooperation and benefit.

A world where we have the space and freedom to look within and find the Buddha within us — where violence becomes impossible because there is only oneness, nothing separate to fight.

Where we discover that love within us — that true source of happiness — a bliss that cannot be taken away because it is who we are.

That is the world we are moving toward.

It doesn’t come from acting on impulses. It comes from stopping, breathing, breaking habitual reactions, and choosing a better path forward. So let’s get to work. Let’s make it happen.