The fol­low­ing excerpt is from an arti­cle by Easwaran that appeared in the Autumn 2006 issue of our quar­terly Blue Moun­tain journal:

“Not long ago it was con­sid­ered impos­si­ble for a human being to run a mile in less than four min­utes. The ‘four-minute mile’ was a built-in phys­i­o­log­i­cal lim­i­ta­tion, a kind of invis­i­ble wall that one could approach but never break through. And while every­body believed this, it was true. Peo­ple resigned them­selves to watch­ing the record creep up by hun­dredths of a sec­ond, harder and harder to beat as the magic wall got closer.

“And then some­body who didn’t believe in invis­i­ble walls – a young Eng­lish physi­cian, Roger Ban­nis­ter – ran faster. It was humanly pos­si­ble! Belief in a four-minute bar­rier col­lapsed. It took just six weeks for another run­ner to break Bannister’s record, and today, moth­ers and stu­dents go out on week­ends and run at speeds that experts once decreed beyond human reach. Today some say the real limit is a three-minute mile. But most peo­ple are unwill­ing to set lim­its at all, and records are bro­ken regularly.

“Unques­tioned beliefs are con­stantly shap­ing how we live. Some, like the super­sti­tion of a four-minute mile, don’t mat­ter much in daily life. But oth­ers can be crip­pling when we impose them on our­selves. ‘I can’t do this,’ we say. ‘That’s not human nature.’ Or, more gen­er­ally, ‘That’s not the way life is.’ Or – per­haps most dam­ag­ing of all – ‘Peace just isn’t pos­si­ble in the real world.’ The under­ly­ing text is always the same: ‘There is noth­ing to be done.’ In other words, we still believe in magic walls.

“Yet no one knows the extent of our inher­ent capac­i­ties. No one can set lim­its to what we can accom­plish with the immense power, wis­dom, imag­i­na­tive action, and com­pas­sion hid­den in us all.”