I believe the thought level (state of mind) does have an impact on global consciousness. Therefore, if a person with passionate positive beliefs were to sit at home doing nothing but praying for change, I believe that their good faith would have a positive impact on reality.
Of course, if a person goes out into the world and gets their hands dirty doing good works (actions), they will receive the immediate payoff of seeing good being done, and it needs people to do this, or else nothing would ever happen.
Not everyone is able to paricpate actively, however, for any number of reasons. Their positive thoughts go hand in hand with the positive actions of the doers, and they are not lesser beings, but complementary beings.
That's what I think.
I have volunteered in the past, but it has never worked out well. For one thing, I can never feel enthusiatic enough about one sole cause - I have a more general desire to bring peace and goodwill to the world, and working towards one cause seems disingenuine to me, espeically when other people involved in the cause are so passionate about it and expect the same from me. My time working for Free Tibet was one such example. Sure I care for Tibet's political freedom, but not any more than I care about anyone else's freedom, and I felt that Free Tibet was one cause at the expense of everything else, and a rather futile one at that.
Secondly, it's very easy for me to feel used in voluntary work situations, and I will not tolerate that for long either. I'm thinking of my very short stint working for Friends of the Earth, where my worth was pretty much based on my output. I didn't feel like a valued human being, which seemed quite ironic. Perhaps I should have formed 'Friends of the people of the earth' to make my point.
Thirdly, promotion and fundraising often involve extrovert activities that I am no good at, regardless of the enthusiasm I might feel inside. A couple of months working to raise recycling awareness through door-to-door canvassing was quite enough to show me that a goodly number of people think I'm a bit of a joke when I'm trying to promote anything via face-to-face contact, and although I very much enjoyed meeting the nice people - that was more about my care for humanity than my care for recycling.
So those are my reasons for not being more active. I just think that my good intentions do not translate well to actions, and that actually makes me less effective at the former, so if, as I believe, having good will does impact on the will of all people, then I'd rather just focus on that. If I'm wrong, then so be it, but whether it's folly or faith, it's the best I can do.
