A lot of people find inspiration in a good, memorable quotation. And unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. Wayne Gretzky, do or do not, there is no try. Jedi Master Yoda.
When a catchy aphroism is spoken by a famous and esteemed person, fictional or otherwise, we give it weight, we treat it as true and wise, we repeat it, and stick it on refrigerators, pin it on cubical walls, make email signatures of it. And there's one of these phrases in particular that has always stood out to my colleague, Evan Chung. I remember seeing it at one of my first jobs, painted in giant letters across an entire wall of the office. And I'm pretty sure you've heard this quote too. We have to be the change we want to see in the world.
Mahatma Gandhi said we have to be the change we want to see in the world. One of my favorites quotes from Gandhi which is, be the change you want to see in the world. Gandhi said you must be the change you see. Here's a quote from Gandhi. Be the change you wish to see in the world.
That's a pretty famous quote. He definitely said that. You hear some variations on it. Be the change you want to see in the world. Be the change you wish to see happen.
But all those three powerful words, be the change. They show up on t-shirts, on bumper stickers, tattooed on people's bodies, even in a raffy song. I can and you can. Together we can. Be the change in the world.
It's a favorite quote of life coaches, leadership trainers, democrats, republicans, fictional presidents. You must be the change you wish to see in the world. Sounds too much like Eastern philosophy. It was bad to sir. Because Gandhi lived in India?
Yeah. Mahatma Gandhi was many things to many people. And his name alone has become a shorthand for moral authority, principal deposition, bravery, justice, spiritual enlightenment. Just no wonder people take his word seriously and look to them for inspiration. The one issue with this particular quote though, with Be the change, is that Gandhi never said it.
And what I wanted to know was, who did? This is Dakota Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. And I'm Evan Sean. Mahatma Gandhi wrote thousands and thousands of pages worth of material in his lifetime, which have been extensively collected and translated and digitized.
And nowhere in them will you find an example of Gandhi actually saying the phrase, be the change you wish to see in the world. In fact, there's no documentation of the saying even existing until the 1970s, decades after he died. So if it doesn't come from Gandhi, where does it come from? Amazingly, what I found is that Be the change has a precise origin point, that it comes from a specific person, a woman who is most decidedly not Mahatma Gandhi. And after hearing her version of events, hearing her wild story about the origins of Be the Change, I promise you will never be able to hear this phrase the same way again.
So today on Dakota Ring, how did Be the Change really come to be? Hey, it's Adam Wild and Jacks, hosts of the Adam Wild and Jacks Show. What does it feel like to have a better laptop like the Dell XBS powered by Intel Core? The premium design that's thin and light, it feels smooth. Very smooth.
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And I really hope that you do. Back to the show. I am not the first person to wonder where be the change really came from. Something about 15 years ago, multiple researchers, scholars and wiki quote investigators began to dig for evidence of its true source. And they independently arrived at the same conclusion that the quote first appeared in the early 1970s in an essay written by a Brooklyn high school teacher.
The very first sentence of that essay reads, one way to start a preventative program is to be the change you want to see happen. What was curious to me was how a sentence from a pedagogical textbook could wind up on posters across the country above the image of Gandhi no less. So I called up the woman who wrote the essay. And the story she told me was so much more intricate, so much stranger, so much more astounding than I ever expected. Her name is Arlene Lorance.
Be the change, you know, over all these decades has gotten attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. Imagine that. I mean, can you imagine a little kid from Brooklyn comes up with a phrase when she's a teacher and being in the same company with him? Arlene lives in Scottsdale, Arizona. She's 87 years old, but you would never guess that.
She's full of spunk as an infectious laugh and a flair for the dramatic that she's held her entire life. Like the night when she was five or six years old and woke up with a pain and started screaming. But when the doctor, her mother, called to the house, looked Arlene over, he found no reason for her to be shouting so melodramatically. And he said there's absolutely nothing wrong with her. She should be an actress.
And that is what she became. By age 11, Arlene was writing and directing her own little place with the other neighborhood kids at the local movie theater before the Saturday matinees. This was in Brownsville in Brooklyn in the 1950s. Her family was working class, Jewish. Her mom, a homemaker, her father, a cutter in the garment industry.
She got into the high school of performing arts, the elite public school that inspired the movie fame. And of course, back in those days, I used to talk like this, you know, because I grew up in Brooklyn and this is what I sounded like. And my speech teacher said to me, you know, Arlene, if you want to play other than Brooklyn's street kids, it would be good if you worked on your speech and changed it. And I gave myself a goal. I said, in two and a half weeks, I'm going to change my entire speech pattern.
And she did it, she says, basically through sheer force of will, I kind of focused dedication to the point of obsession that's followed her through her life, which seemed to pay off when she started lining up professional acting gigs after graduation, including a commercial for Johnson's Foots Oak and a small role in an off-Broadway play alongside some pretty heavy hitters. My father was played by Gene Hackman. It was, it was a thoroughly wonderful experience which ran for two nights. Her first major role in the film, however, which turned out to be her only major role in the film was somewhat less illustrious. I do want to ask about the movie Confessions of a Psycho Cat.
Oh, Evan, you did, you did your research. Confessions of a Psycho Cat is a minor cult classic that took me a while to connect Arlene because her real name isn't in the credits. Let your feet off my table. But that's her. And as Arlene tells it, this movie would be the trigger for a surprising chain of events that would ultimately lead to be the change.
The script was for a psychological thriller, a loose adaptation of the most dangerous game. Arlene plays the titular Psycho Cat, a deranged woman who offers three men a chance at $100,000, if they can stay alive for 24 hours. What's the catch? Simple. I'm going to hunt you down.
Then I shall kill you. You must be joking. I'm not joking. And one of those guys was Jake Lamona, the boxer. As in the guy later played by Robert De Niro in the Biopic Raging Bull.
You don't have a chance. I get in close. I'll break you in half. We'll see. And how do you take down a raging bull?
You dress up as a bullfighter. I had a whole matador costume on and I had these big blades that I was holding. You know, he died beautifully. And I think I was pretty good. Did you have hopes for the movie?
Well sure. You know, I thought here was a ready-made opportunity. I had great hopes that this would be the start of my career. A long time went by though before she heard anything about the film actually being finished. In the meantime, she was working as a high school theatre teacher and was married to a fellow actor named Dick Lorans.
He was actually one of her victims in Compassion of the Psycho Cat. Finally, in 1968, almost two years after shooting, Arlene and Dick were told the movie was done and was playing in just one movie theater in New Jersey. So they headed over there to see it. We go into the theater and the first thing I notice is that there are only men in the theater. And most of them have their coats on their lap.
This gave me a first clue that perhaps something was not good here. And the film started and that was fine. But as we got into it, I was so shocked and outraged at what we were seeing on the screen. All these people running around nude. One of them.
Apparently, the filmmakers had not had much luck selling the movie as a psychological thriller. So they decided to make it into a psychological porno film. Hey, wait a minute. Your pants. You still have yours on?
Even after Arlene had finished shooting, they had gone back and filmed a bunch of sex scenes featuring random characters completely unrelated to the plot and haphazardly spliced them in at various points of the movie. Okay, now yours. But God, this is my movie debut as a young actor in New York finally getting a lead role in a movie and this is what they did do it. I was so distressed by what I saw on the screen that the next week I had heart disease because my heart was broken. Arlene believes the shock of seeing the film resulted in her contracting pericarditis and inflammation of the lining of the heart.
Certainly within days, she was seriously ill with the condition at age 29. She spent six weeks laid up in the hospital, followed by months of heart recovery, where she couldn't work or really do much of anything at all. I really couldn't comb my hair because I didn't have the strength to lift the brush. I looked like a concentration camp victim because I could barely eat. Finally, in the summer of 1969, Arlene began to feel well again.
And to celebrate, she and her husband made the fateful decision to drive out west to discover the America beyond New York City. I had lived in concrete all of my life and here we were out in the country. I mean, there were trees, there were farms, there was grass. Look at this. They made it all the way to California and stopped at Big Sur.
Which is extraordinary. They were seen in the Pacific Ocean before. This was an amazing thing. And I was standing in a dusty roadway while Dick went to the restroom and there was a little flower that grew in the middle of nothing that was yellow. It had normal looking petals, it had some green around it.
It was just little old flowers sitting in the road growing. And I bent down and I looked into the heart of the flower and everything disappeared. The only thing that was there was the energy. The energy of the flower. And I entered that energy.
It's as if everything turned to light. I was light and the flower was light and beams of light were shooting out all around me and everywhere. The whole color spectrum was there and I could almost hear the sound of the flower. I was singing this high-pitched tone and I simply became one with it and one with everything. It was the whole of me merging with the whole of life.
It took, I don't know, two seconds? I opened my eyes, looked down. Same flowers, same dusty road. But everything else was different. I didn't know what happened.
It was later that I was able to see the heart disease. I thought at the time it was a physical thing but I realized that this physical condition was really the opening of my heart center in a way that I had never known before. And everything just shifted and changed. I do have to ask because you know it, that this was California in 1969. This sounds like the description of a psychedelic experience.
It sounds like an acid trip. Did you do drugs? Never. No, no, no, no. There was just this astounding energy shift and I've never been the same since.
When we come back, how the change within Arlene leads to be the change. Now more than ever, quality matters. But so does Price and Marshall's. You don't have to choose. You can get the good stuff for less.
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Shop new styles in store or online at Pandora.net. After Arlene had what she calls her cosmic experience a big sir, she and her husband returned to New York. She began reading books, esoteric works, a mysticism, a theosophy and couldn't make much sense out of them. But then at night, when she went to bed, she started having what she calls sleep travel experiences. Now I'm not calling them dreams because they were not dreams.
I would go to sleep and then I in my sleep, I would go off to what I can only call classes. There were no teachers that I could see. These were not physical classrooms. There was no visual, but they were someplace in the energy world where I was being instructed. Arlene says that during these nocturnal classes, within this void, she can't fully explain.
Some kind of ancient wisdom was being imparted to her. And then I would wake up and I couldn't remember a single thing that took place. None of the learning was available to me. I couldn't remember anything except that what I learned was vitally important and it's too bad I can't touch it. Was that frustrating for you to wake up and not have a grasp on it?
No, no, it wasn't because I had the knowing that when I was ready to embody what I was learning, I would remember. And that's exactly how it turned out. The place where it all finally came together, according to Arlene, was Thomas Jefferson High School in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn. In 1970, Arlene was a speech and theatre teacher there. The school was a mess.
As was the country in those days, the Vietnam War was on. In this particular neighborhood, there were burned out buildings, there were riots all the time, lots of cars had broken windows, there was garbage everywhere. I mean, it was a dreadful environment. It's true that, like in a lot of New York City at the time, white flight had left behind a community facing poverty and political unrest. And a student body that was now almost entirely black and Puerto Rican.
The teaching staff was largely white and Jewish, like Arlene. The school was dealing with deep racial tensions, severe overcrowding, and waves of violence. I spent a lot of time in energy trying to get my colleagues to help me find a way that we could elevate the life of the student body. And nothing was happening. It was a disaster.
And that's the environment. According to Arlene, where her cosmic breakthrough took the next step and where B. the change was born. It started one day in late October. Arlene's class was sitting in the auditorium, watching the assembly, when a fight broke out between two kids.
They were reaching across and punching one another and around them. All the students around them, about 50 students, stood up and started screaming for blood, kill them, kill them, you know. Normally she would have stayed far away. But this day Arlene says some force was compelling her to act. I felt this push at my back, was telling me go there.
So she got out of her seat, rushed up the aisle, and put herself right in between the two kids. And I put out my hands toward their heart centers. I didn't say anything. I was sending love energy to them. And then Arlene remembers both boys fell quiet and walked away in opposite directions.
In an instant, the tension in the whole auditorium had been diffused. And I stood there in place, absolutely trembling. The bell rang, the assembly was over. Arlene went back to her cluttered office, stunned and overwhelmed. So I sat down at my desk, my chair was turned round, and there came a ray of light through the wall.
A thin beam, a single thin beam of light literally came through the wall. There was a window, but this ray of light did not come from the window. It's not with a ray of light coming through the wall. I thought, what is this? But then Arlene began to feel that finally, all of the teaching that she could never recall from her sleep classes was now being awakened.
Because carried on this ray of light, she says, was a set of six principles that spoke to her in her voice. I wrote them down as fast as I could. They were all scribbled on a piece of paper. And so what does it say? Can you repeat back to me what these were?
The principles. Yeah. Yes. The first principle that came was like an instruction to myself. It was be the change you want to see happen instead of trying to change anyone else.
The rest follow. Receive all people as beautiful exactly as they are. Provide others with opportunities to give. Have no expectations, but rather abundant expectancy. Problems are opportunities.
And create your own reality consciously. That's what I scribbled. Arlene would come to call these six maxims the love principles. Now, if I tell people about this, you know, okay lady, you disappear in the flower, you have light coming through a wall. This is, no wonder you made confessions of a psycho cat.
There's something radically wrong with you. It was like a physical experience of enlightenment in light. I mean, there was there was there was light. So I was I was energized by it. It was as if someone had plugged me into the wall, you know, and electrified me.
She was so electrified that very same afternoon. She spoke up at a faculty meeting to share what she'd received without mentioning the part about the rate of light coming from the wall. And I get up in front of them and I say, we're going to turn this whole school around. We're going to make change here. I said, we're going to have a love project.
Now, I hadn't the foggiest idea what I was talking about. I mean, what is a love project? I didn't know. She began by creating a student group called the Seekers. And what the Seekers did was bake cookies, 8,000 chocolate chip cookies.
They just dropped them off one day during a homeroom on every kid's desk. When the bell rang and students filed out to their next class full of cookies, Harleen says the hallways were a buzz. And they were smiling. They were talking to each other. They were laughing.
They were, was that good or was that good? These Seekers, I don't know who they are, but this is fabulous. And I heard students say, I wonder what's next. What was next for the love project was a book giveaway. Then came a toy drive, a music vest, a painting program.
For something with the kind of cosmic origins Arlene describes, the actual love project was all pretty straightforward, really. But the way Arlene remembers it, in seven months, the whole atmosphere of the school transformed. She says there was greater attendance, more learning, and more hope. It was enough to even get some local press. When Be the Change came, it started a momentum in the school that was unstoppable.
Arlene recalls in particular an incident when a black militant came by the school and addressed a gathering of students. And he was saying, look, you have to burn down the whole neighborhood so they'll be able to see what they're doing to us. And that, that will bring some results. And as he was talking and ranting, students got up one at a time, at a time, and left because no one wanted to hear that. They were focused on love and on being the change they wanted to see happen.
And they were not buying that line anymore. Listen to this. You may be wondering if everything happened precisely the way Arlene remembers it. The New York Daily News did report that the Board of Education was enthusiastic about the love project, and the school principal said that kids who used to cut class were now convinced to show up. I can't confirm the story about the black militant.
And as for wisdom beaming out of a wall, you'll have to decide what you think. What I know for sure is that Arlene is positive it all happened this way, and that it showed the potency of Be the Change. Even so, it's a big jump to becoming a phrase known all around the world. As far as I can tell, the local newspaper articles never mentioned it. So there is more to this story.
Or Be the Change, the break containment, and Journey out into the world. Arlene would have to meet someone new. A woman with a story even more fantastic than her own. That's after the break. At Capital One, we don't just use technology.
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Okay, so it's 1971. Be the Change now exists. Because Arlene says she has received it along with the other love principles via a beam of light. She's put these principles into action at her broken high school, which gets some amount of attention. But it still seems so far off and so unlikely that something a drama teacher may have said while distributing cookies would become a ubiquitous quotation, much less one attributed to Mahatma Gandhi of all people.
And the journey to get there begins with Arlene quitting her job and moving with her husband to California. At that point in my life, I needed something more beautiful to live in. And concrete and bricks was not it. They had no jobs lined up. She was just open to be guided to whatever was next.
Their only concrete plan was that Arlene had a scholarship to attend a six-week training in San Diego at the National Center for the Exploration of Human Potential. And one day, at a training session, a woman named Patricia came into the room. Arlene had never met her, never even seen her before. But she says she felt an invisible push, like the one she felt during the fight in the auditorium, to go and speak with this stranger about something seemingly random. I went up to her and I said, I introduced myself.
I said, I have some paintings that I would love for you to come and see them. And Patricia said, well, you know, sure, I'll be happy to come. In her free time, Arlene had been making a lot of abstract spiritual paintings. They're free form. I'm letting the brushes paint on the canvas.
I have no idea what I'm going to do. And in the very first one, this skeletal face appeared. It was really more of a blur, not very recognizable as human. But Arlene says to her surprise, in every new painting, as she let the brushes guide themselves, the same face kept emerging, clearer and clearer and more prominent each time. Oh, what is this?
Who is this person who keeps appearing in my painting? It's as if through the universe somehow she's being painted into my paintings. This sounds absurd. And it was. And so when this new acquaintance, Patricia, came by her apartment, those were the paintings that she showed her.
She looked and after time, she said, I think my friend Diane needs to see these. And I said, and Evan, I'm telling you this, just came just as if the words fell out of my mouth. I said, are you talking about Diane Kennedy Pike? She said, how do you know my friend Diane Kennedy Pike? Arlene did not know Patricia's friend Diane Kennedy Pike.
And she says she has no idea what letter to blur that name out. So my friend called me that night and said, you need to come to San Diego to meet this Arlene Lawrence, whoever that is. And see her spiritual paintings. And I thought, oh, no, here we go again. This is Diane Kennedy Pike.
And she is going to play a pivotal role in taking be the change from Arlene's personal motto to the inescapable inspirational maxim we know today. So to get there, I need to make a big detour and tell you Diane's story. Diane grew up in a small community in Nebraska and a family of devout Methodists. She spent three years as a missionary in South America, right after graduating from Stanford. And when she returned to California, she signed up for some summer classes at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, where one faculty member stood out to her.
James Pike. He was known as very far out. How is it that someone so controversial was brought here in Holy Week of all that? At least nobody has proposed yet to crucify me. James Pike was the Episcopal Bishop of California.
You may not have heard of him, but at one point he was an incredibly famous and controversial figure. He spoke out against the Vietnam War, supported gay rights, and went to Selma to protest segregation. But the next step, I think, is to be going on in the thousands and a thousand waves after waves against these brutal fake truths. But he was also a lightning rod within the Episcopal Church. He fought to ordain women before the Church had officially sanctioned it, and he publicly questioned some major theological tenets, like the Virgin Birth and the Trinity.
Don't you believe that Christ was sent into heaven? We're excited where? No, I don't believe in the ascension of Jesus and I don't know. I believe that he continued in personal, ongoing life like all of his will. All this meant that some of his fellow bishops viewed him as a dangerous radical, and constantly threatened to put him on trial for heresy.
He was just cutting edge. To Diane, taking a class in this guy sounded like it would at least be interesting. So she signed up. And on the first day, Bishop Pike asked if any of the students would be able to give him a lift into San Francisco after class. And I raised my hand.
And on that first drive, it was just very clear that there was a very deep connection from the very beginning. He felt it also. Bishop Pike was 25 years older than Diane. But after that, he made sure to be in need of a ride every day. Before long, he and Diane were in a relationship.
She moved in with him in August 1967 and began to accompany him as he traveled to give talks. All right. Well, when I was working on this with Jim, at least, my initial reaction was, my lord, and I've been deceived my whole life. That's footage of Diane appearing alongside him at a seminar at the Esselen Institute in Big Sur. She had entered his life at a moment when he was becoming even more notorious in the church and in the public.
In early 1966, Pike's son from a previous marriage died by suicide. And afterwards, in the London apartment where they'd been staying together, Pike claimed that he began to experience strange phenomena. The thermostat was found set uncomfortably high, the way Jimmy liked it. This is from a TV episode hosted by Leonard Nimoy devoted to Pike. And the most startling incident, Pike watched as a hand mirror moved by itself.
It was Jimmy trying to communicate with him. Pike began to consult with mediums to try to speak with his son, and in one infamous incident, even held a seance on television. The gyms as he wants you to definitely understand that you and any other member of the family have any right to feel in his sense of guilt. Diane sat in on several of these sessions. I was open.
I thought it was possible that communication could be established, but I never became a true believer in the sense of not having any questions. I just stayed open. And I believe her or not, she ended up co-authoring a book with Pike about his attempts to communicate with his son called the Other Side. Now, dabbling in the occult and all the attention that came with it was just added fuel to a constantly growing fire. And when Pike and Diane got married in December 1968 without the approval of the church, he was officially banned from preaching.
Soon after, he announced he was leaving the church entirely. And at that point, he and Diane decided to head to Israel to research a book they wanted to write about the historical Jesus, which is what led them on September 1, 1969, to venture into the Judean desert. Into the biblical wilderness where Jesus was said to have wandered for 40 days being tempted by the devil. We had rented a car at the airport and we had a little map that they gave us and we looked and we said, okay, we'll just drive out into the desert. That looks easy.
A couple of hours later, they were lost. And when Diane tried to turn around and go back the way they came, one wheel of their rental car dropped into a deep rut. And we couldn't get it out. They were stranded around them. They could see nothing but endless desert.
It was over 100 degrees out. Diane was wearing sandals. And they didn't even have water, just two bottles of Coca-Cola. We did everything wrong. But they couldn't just stay there.
So they began walking and what they thought was the right direction. For hours, they walked and walked, climbing over cliffs, pausing when possible in caves. Finally, her husband said he couldn't go on without rest. But I thought, I have to keep going because I need to find help. So I told Jim, I said, if I die, on the way, you'll know I went because I love you.
She walked down into a severe canyon. Without any water, she drank her own urine. She kept willing herself to keep going as she clambered over sharp rocks and her sandals. I would talk to my body. I would say you have to find a place to hold on to the rock.
Then I would talk to the rocks and bless them for holding me. After walking through the night, in the morning, she arrived at a road. Two exhausted to stand anymore, she laid out and rolled her way down, calling out for help. And somebody answered. I couldn't believe it.
Somebody answered me. Israeli Army helicopters and police tonight continue to scour the Judean Desert near the Dead Sea for former official James Pike, lost in the area for the last two days. In Jerusalem, the day his wife, Diane, found wandering in the desert yesterday, described to CBS Newsman Larry Pomeroy, the ordeal after the couple's car broke down. His last words to me were that. He was at peace.
And he had no regrets about anything because we were so happy and our love was so great. When they finally found him, it was partly because there were vultures circling above the body. Dr. James A. Pike, the former Episcopal Bishop of California, was married to there in Yapa, Israel.
He was lost last week in the Judean Desert and his body was found yesterday near the Dead Sea. It was a fall, not dehydration that had killed him. Pike had apparently climbed to the top of a wadi and slipped over 60 feet. At the time of his death, hand Diane had only been married for eight months. So it was a very brief merging of our lives.
The grief was really intense. But I just knew that whatever I was supposed to do from here on would unfold for me and I just moved ahead as best I could. Diane spent the next year regrouping at home in Santa Barbara, trying to figure out what was next. Meanwhile, her husband's disappearance and death had been international news. So she started to hear from mediums and psychics, claiming they had been in contact with him from the other side.
And I hadn't received any message that felt authentic to me. And I was tired of receiving all of these messages. And it was right at that moment when her friend Patricia called, saying she really needed to come to San Diego to check out the spiritual paintings made by some lady named Arlene. Diane really wasn't interested. But she politely told her friend, fine, if she ever made it to San Diego, which she rarely said, she'd look Arlene up.
Three days later, Diane's book editor called and asked if she could attend a meeting in San Diego. When she got into town, she arranged for Arlene to meet her at her hotel. I went down to the lobby in Hotel Del Coronado and this woman was sitting on a couch with her back to me. And she leaped out of the couch and landed onto feet. And I said, hello.
She said, if I remember correctly, I love you. In that very moment, I knew this is person I love. It was so clear. I'd never met her before. And I didn't know what to do with that.
Arlene brought Diane back to her apartment and began showing her the series of paintings she'd made. At the first one, she said, do you see this face that is emerging? I didn't see anything. Arlene showed her the next painting and the next one. Diane still had no idea what she was talking about.
Until she got to the final painting. And in the final painting, I could not only see the face, but I recognized that I was the face in the painting. Yes, I know. I know you are. That was mind blowing.
Now I got there. I had no clue. What are you feeling about that moment? Surprise. Aw.
And just open to see what this was about. Over the next weeks and months, Diane and Arlene continued to meet and get to know each other. The attraction was intense, but not romantic or sexual. Arlene had lost all interest in sex after her revelation with the flower. Nothing could match the high.
It was touching ecstasy, which never goes away. Partially as a consequence, her marriage was coming to an end, right as she and Diane reforming a connection. Diane, for her part, was fascinated by Arlene's story about receiving the love principles, which resonated with her deeply. I'd already been living my life focused on unconditional love and each of the principles that she talked about them were familiar to me and how I lived my life. Arlene had the feeling that they were meant to do something with this connection together.
I said, we have a work to do. And I said, fine, you know, what is it? And she said, I don't know. Even without a plan in 1972, they got to work. Arlene provided the principles and the unbridled energy.
Diane's contribution was just as crucial. She brought a network of connections and funds with an insurance payout from Bishop Pike Steph. She bought a house in San Diego where she and Arlene could live and work together. Neither of them had a job. For years, they lived entirely off the insurance money as they tried to spread the love principles.
Diane was pivotal in this, too. She encouraged Arlene to write about the experience at her high school, which is how it would be the change appeared in print for the first time. Diane also took an organization that her husband had founded at that point called the Bishop Pike Foundation and renamed it the Love Project. And they used the Pike Foundation's nationwide mailing list, sending letters to all the old contacts offering to tell them about the wisdom that Arlene had received. And one day, they got her response back.
A woman called and said, would you be willing to come to my apartment and speak to some of my friends in my living room? And we said, sure. That was the beginning of our 50 years of work because we got one invitation after another from people to come to their living rooms. They called their living room workshops practice sessions. They take turns presenting one of the love principles and leading exercises where the group could work out how to incorporate it into their own lives.
And always the big stress was on be the change, always, always, always. They could look where they were living, who they were in their own lives, and how they could be the change where they were without trying to change anyone else. The love principles arrived in an era when many people, ordinary people, were seeking something greater for themselves. They were blending Eastern religion with Western philosophy. It was the rise of new age spirituality, of Est in the human potential movement, of Hare Krishna in the Jesus movement, of alternative health and self-help.
Permeating through much of it was a spirit of individualism and introspection, a feeling that the self is free and autonomous and that one's goal should be to unlock its potential. And into that came Arlene and Diane, with a message that people need only rely on themselves to make a difference in the world. The last of the love project principles is, be the change you want to see happen. That's the one. Instead of trying to change everybody else.
Which is again the active side of creating your own reality. This is Diane and Arlene in a radio interview from 1975, where they also told the whole origin story of the ray of light and of the project Thomas Jefferson High School. Some of us decided really to be the change that we wanted to see happen in the midst of what others were turning a horrendous situation. You can hear Arlene emphasizing that the be the change principle has always had a crucial second half, one that everybody today is always leading off. It's be the change you want to see happen.
And out trying to change anyone else. Because that never works. And that's what people found inspiring when she shared her story. Arlene hadn't bothered winning over skeptical colleagues or politicians. To transform her school, all she had to do was embody the change herself.
Soon, Arlene and Diane were traveling all around North America, speaking to groups in living rooms and churches and conferences. We did no advertising. It all happened. One person telling another, telling another. And everywhere they went, they left behind a stack of love principle mementos.
It had been the suggestion of one of the early attendees of their practice sessions. He said, you know, you should put these principles on a card that's the size that I can carry in my pocket because otherwise I'll never remember them. Well, these live yellow cards have traveled around the world. And every one of them says, among other things, be the change on them. Oh, yes, every one of them.
And it was after about 10 years of this, of doing workshops, of these yellow cards spreading across the country with be the change printed on them that had happened for the first time. She doesn't remember where exactly. But at some point in the 1980s, Arlene saw be the change you wish to see in the world quoted out in the wild with no reference to her or the love principles. It was attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. And I said, really?
I thought, that's amazing. What great company I'm in. Could you have possibly taken it back in your mind from something that you'd read? Had you read Gandhi's works or something like that? No, all the six principles came on that ray of light through that wall.
It is true that nobody has ever been able to find any instance of Gandhi saying be the change you wish to see in the world. And it's not just that they haven't found it. Some people have questioned if it even makes sense that something Gandhi might have said. A 2011 op-ed in the New York Times suggested be the change seemed too apolitical and even smug sounding to really come from Gandhi, whose strategy for change after all was not to focus on himself, but on the mobilization of a mass collective movement of nonviolent resistance. But there is one thing Gandhi wrote that does seem worth mentioning.
It's a newspaper article of his from 1913 about snake bites, where he offers a lot of practical advice about what to do if you get bitten by snake. But in the middle of all of it, he briefly makes a case for compassion towards snakes despite their apparent cruelty because the cruelty of nature is there within humankind too. Gandhi writes, we but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.
As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. We need not wait to see what others do. Meaningwise, that is in the realm of be the change you wish to see in the world. But it seems unlikely to me that even in paraphrase, this could be the true source of the quote that Arlene or anyone else would have taken a random paragraph from an obscure article about snake venom and condensed and meme-ified it into ubiquity without any paper trail. The simpler and more likely explanation is that Arlene herself was the source of this phrasing.
Though not even Arlene will take credit for the concept. I would say to you that there is nothing new that any of us bring into being. There's basic ancient wisdom that has always existed. I mean, conceptually, be the change is pretty simple after all. It's lead by example.
It's practice what you preach. It's just do it. But I think it is the specific phrasing here that actually matters. Not the concept. That's three word punch.
Be the change. That's what makes it so sticky and powerful. It's catchy. It's active. It's inspirational.
It's a slogan. And all evidence does suggest that particular phrasing originates with Arlene Lorenz. Or at least with the ray of light that Arlene says emanated out to her from a wall in October 1970. Me the change came from the classes I went to in my sleep. And when I was ready to be the change, then the words came and they were clear.
So if Be the Change didn't originate with Gandhi, how did it get connected with him? The earliest record I can confirm of someone referring to it as a Gandhi quote comes in a 1987 article in a Santa Fe newspaper about a local peace activist and artist who said she took inspiration from Gandhi's advice to be the change to found an organization honoring senior citizens in her community. Now, I would be surprised if she was actually the first person to ever make this attribution. By the time something like this appears in writing, it's typically something people have been saying to one another for some time. This activist, like Arlene and Diane, was very connected to New Age circles, the same circles in which the love principles and the yellow cards would be the change printed on them were circulating.
It seems likely that in this era when Christian mysticism and Eastern philosophy and so many other things were swirling around and being blended and paraphrased and reworked, somebody in that world mistakenly matched Be the Change with the figure of Mahatma Gandhi and that began to circulate. And Gandhi was in the zeitgeist. Some men change their times. One man changed the world for all time. My name is Gandhi.
Juan does Kig Gandhi. The biopic of Gandhi was released in 1982, won multiple Oscars and sparked a revival of interest in him and in the West a kind of veneration. The complexities of his life for being sanded down into the figure of a saint whose every word dripped with wisdom. By the late 80s, this Gandhi misquote began to show up very occasionally in some books. And one of those books was cited by Al Gore in his book, Earth in the Balance, published in the middle of the 1992 presidential campaign.
And the Gandhi quote he had borrowed became a part of his stump speech on the campaign trail. Mahatma Gandhi once said, you must become the change you wish to see in the world. We have to become the change we want to see in the United States of America. I began to see it on cups, on t-shirts, pencils, posters, any kind of trinket. Pretty soon organizations were calling themselves be the change.
Was there a moment where you realized, oh, this has become something else now? Yes, I think it was when I heard Obama had used it. I've always found inspiration in the life of Gandhiji and is simple and profound lesson to be the change we seek in the world. I thought, oh boy, we have now arrived. I was just, I was thrilled.
Arlene says it's never bothered her, but she never got fame for originating be the change. You can't be famous from a spiritual gift that has been given to make the whole world a better place. They don't belong to anyone. They're out there for everyone. But she does admit that as the years went on, the constant misattribution did start to frustrate her.
I did feel that it should least be called one of the love principles. And eventually I wrote to various places just to tell them, you know, and I often ask them, would you like me to come to speak to your people and elaborate on this and tell people how this came into being? Because it's a pretty exciting story. But I never hear from any of them. I'm not really that surprised because the truth is I think it's only because of the Gandhi Association.
However false, that be the change has become what it has. Even if you believe the words have inherent truth and power, we only put it on bumper stickers because of the moral authority that the Gandhi name lends it. It's up to you whether the meaning of the phrase has changed, knowing where it really began. But I doubt Al Gore or Barack Obama would be quoting it if they thought it came from a former high school drama teacher, let alone one who herself believes she learned it from a mystical revelation. I lean still at it at age 87, still writing, still doing consciousness coaching.
And she and Diane are still together, soulmates in what they call a spiritual union. So we've been together for 55 years now. I hadn't a clue when I first met her that I'd be spending the rest of my life with her. Not a clue. They've cut down on the work they do a bit these days.
But Arlene is still having visions. She believes she's seen that some kind of cataclysmic event is imminently in store for us, where the universe will take action to protect the Earth from those who threaten it. Because the universe is more interested in the survival of the planet than the people on the planet. It's coming. And if human beings don't make it, so be it, we'll just start over again.
Until then, she's still trying to be the change she wants to see happen in little ways throughout her daily life. When she goes out grocery shopping, she's known to stop people in the produce aisle and pose them a question. It occurred to me to go up to a stranger and say, what is the most meaningful thing in your life? I do it as often as possible. And an amazing thing happens, Evan.
They stop right in their tracks and they go inside. It's as if the whole world disappears and they're going in to see what is the most meaningful thing in my life. And then they come back and they look me in the eye and their whole demeanor has changed from a stranger to a confidant. What are some of the answers you've gotten? I'm going to ask you.
What's the most meaningful thing in your life? I mean, I think I'm going to have to say my partner. You know, we've been together for, oh gosh, 15 years now. And every day she's, you know, she provides meaning to me, I would say. See now your whole demeanor has changed.
Your whole face is lit up. You're blushing. You look like you're filled with love and joy. And that to me is worth everything. It's always like beaming a light into their center of their being because we are not strangers.
We are all one being and I want to know what's most meaningful in your life. So I'm being it every day. I'm being the change. I want to see happen. This is Dakota Ring.
I'm Evan Sean. And I'm Willa Paskin. Please consider signing up for Dakota Ring Plus. Again, you have just a few more days until October 16th, 2026 to get 50% off a one year membership. You'll be supporting the show in a way that really matters by doing so.
And you'll get to listen to it without any ads, get a limited reading on Slate.com, and get exclusive access to every episode of Dakota Ring's Back. All that for just $59 by going to Slate.com slash Decoder Plus and entering the promo code Decoder50 at checkout. This episode was written and produced by Evan Chung, the Coder Ring supervising producer. It was edited by me and Max Reedman, who also produces the show. Marriage, Jacob is senior technical director.
Thank you to Keith Acres. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to code, please email us at Decoder Ring at Slate.com or call us at 347-460-7281. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in two weeks. Hey folks, this is Freddy. I'm Will.
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