“If you are going to fight the boss, go after you have leveled enough.” These words, here put in the mouth of Thomas Edison (in background with steam-powered PSP), are probably worth a try. And no, despite featuring Edison, it is actually not made by Happy Science.

When you are 50 years old, writes Ryuho Okawa, the karma of your soul is approximately 80% finished. Or in other words, the person you are going to be in your next life is about 80% decided.

I don’t have any revelation about the “next life” part of this, but it certainly makes sense to me that at as we grow older, we become more set in our ways. You don’t really need to be the Buddha to realize that, although I suppose it helps. Most married women seems to know it as well, at least about their husbands. (Or that was the case in my childhood, when a woman had the same husband for decades. It is probably not as easy to notice if you did not know him when he was young.)

But in addition to the personal inertia of each of us, which usually increases with age, there is also the inertia of society, which has lately lessened. The “consensus reality” is loosening, fragmenting, and expanding. This is a rare opportunity, for good and for bad.

Boris Mouravieff uses the expression “General Law” about the force that keep people mainstream, so to speak. Unfortunately his choice of name for this force did not foresee Google, where any discussion of it is likely to drown in the army of lawyers. It is an interesting concept. It operates on several different levels: The social, where people will obviously treat you differently if you start to become unusual. The personal, where the weight of your own habits and attachments will hold you back if you try to change. And even a seemingly supernatural aspect, in which unlikely events start to line up as you reach the shore of consensus reality and start to dip your toes in the water of the unknown. He insists however that it is simply a law of nature, albeit a very far-reaching one.

I don’t really know more than that. Barely even that, actually. I have so far resisted buying his books, since even the people who praise them readily admit that there seems to be some insanity in them. And those people generally don’t seem too mainstream themselves.

Now as I said before, the times have changed regarding what is mainstream. Society has fractured into subcultures. It is hard to even claim that American liberals and conservatives live in the same world, for instance. To take the perhaps most concrete example, the planet on which the liberals live is heating steadily, and this is a scientific and measurable fact. The planet on which the conservatives live is fairly stable, temperature-wise, but has been cooling for about a decade now, and this is a scientific and measurable fact. Don’t get me started on the worlds in which CIA (with or without alien technology) invented the HIV virus, killed President Kennedy and blew up the World Trade Center.

It is probably next to impossible for a young person today to imagine the social resistance to change in times past, even a couple generations ago. At the time, people would look at you strangely if you did not go to church each Sunday. Now you have to go to the mosque to get that kind of looks and whispering from your neighbors. (In the western world, that is. If you live in a land where the norm is going to the mosque, things are probably quite different.) Another generation or two back, and your career was pretty much decided when you were born, and your marriage not much later. There were only so many farms and fishing boats in your village, after all, and a woman could not survive legally or otherwise without a man to take care of her. Well, unless she was a teacher. A little further back there were no teachers, instead there were witches, and if your pronunciation of the letter R was a little off, you just might end up in hot water, or glowing coals or something. I’d say the peer pressure in today’s high school is not the ultimate pinnacle of its type, bad as it may be.

Today, you are largely free to choose your poison, or your antidote as the case may be. Sure, there may be a price to pay: You may find old friends turning their back on you, and may even miss a promotion at work. But you are unlikely to find yourself homeless unless you are severely out of alignment with the world most of us live in. And you are pretty sure to not get burned on a stake (or get a stake through your heart).

Even then, the personal and subconscious resistance to change remains as strong as ever. And there are a lot of assumptions that are shared by most subcultures, and/or are reinforced daily by advertising and popular entertainment.

This has been a long way of saying it, but: If you think change is easy, you have probably never tried.

I present you the fact that at best 5% of those who go on a diet achieve lasting change in their body mass. (As in, a decade later.) Note that this is 5% of those who actually try, as opposed to 5% of the populace. In other words, if you look at a school class, there is likely to be either one or none who will take charge of their own physical shape beyond what is already natural to them.

Now consider that this example is about something that has obvious health effects and an effort that is lauded by society, encouraged by the medical establishment, and likely to net you personally an economic surplus. Did I mention save your life from a painful early death? And it is still almost impossible to achieve merely by the means of your own willpower and the support of friends, family and your family doctor.

Now, I honestly don’t mean to write about your obesity or lack thereof. My point is simply that even when the odds are stacked grotesquely in favor of changing something glaringly obvious in your life, it is still almost impossible to change. Even before you are 50. What then if you set before you the task to change what is inside, what is invisible to everyone but you and your God (if any). Something that will require sacrifice in this world, will not make you popular, will not make you rich, and will certainly not bring you any hot loving.

I do not mean to discourage those who seek sanctification (or Enlightenment, or whatever you will call it). Well, not any more than my hero Jesus Christ meant to discourage everyone when he said that the path is narrow and there are few who find it. (He did, if translation to several European languages is even vaguely correct, not even talk about whether they actually walked on it, just whether they found it.)

It is not a discouragement. It is merely a fact. Most people will never be able to change even if they want it. Even if they honestly, seriously want it. This is not because it is impossible. It is because people are people. And even if we really, really want to change, there is always something else we want too. Well, that’s my theory at least. Think about it. Isn’t it because there is something else we ALSO want?

In any case, “just do it” won’t do. Inhuman persistence seems to be a minimum requirement. But you’ll never know how hard it is until you try. Until then you can talk with great confidence.