On My Mind
By Joseph Dispenza

President Al Gore’s first inaugural address, January 20, 2009

The following article first appeared in Atención, October 26, 2007.

A leader is a dealer in hope. Napoleon Bonaparte

My fellow citizens:

On this chilly January morning, standing here before our nation’s capital, I challenge all of us to open our minds and our hearts, to stretch our perceptions and expand our imaginations. We have been thinking of ourselves as citizens of a powerful nation—some would even say a world empire. However, let us now begin to think of ourselves as members of a vast planetary tribe.


Because of our intrinsic connection to one another, I call upon us to be an Axis of Good for each other. Let us take the energy we have been spending on making war and redirect it toward creating opportunities for the advancement of the human spirit. Let us generate meaningful works of art and brilliant new ideas. In the century just past, 100 million of our brothers and sisters were slaughtered and the earth was blown up and violated. We must never allow this to happen again.

I will lead you out of the erroneous ways of thinking that have brought us to the point of believing that money, power, speed, novelty and mindless entertainments are the measure of our worth. Together we will cultivate the great human values of magnanimity, balance, generosity, detachment and innocence. 

We have seen in recent years the triumph of religion over reason. I call upon you to awaken from the dangerous illusions that we are “sinful” and unworthy, that there is a “God” somewhere withholding good things from us—and mostly that our eternal fates are in the hands of preachers, priests, rabbis, mullahs and gurus with their holy books and sacred scriptures. Let us take on the mantle of responsibility and be the rational beings we were truly created to be.

Much of our planetary conflict has been over which “God” is God. Let us decide now to end that conflict by agreeing that all our “Gods” are God—and that every spiritual path back to the Creator is valid. 

Under my leadership, we will stop making and selling arms. We will stop training people to kill and to torture our human brothers and sisters. I will ask you to cultivate, in the place of war, the virtues of charity and kindness. I call upon you to minister to the unfortunate, to help heal the sick, to shelter the homeless, to make the world around you better today than it was yesterday.

In place of greed, let us entertain the notion that we all have enough of everything. We have enough food and drink for the 45,000 people on our planet who otherwise will have died of starvation tomorrow—38,000 of them children. But our fears of insufficiency, courting every kind of lack and limitation, have made us an insatiable people. I urge you to leave fear behind and walk the spiritual path of love.


In place of a lust for dominance, let us begin to live from a position of alliance and compassion. In place of separation from each other and from our mother the earth, let us understand that we are as One, each a part of the other. 

Because we are a one-species tribe, I dare us to think outside our old national boundaries, to see ourselves as if from the surface of the Moon—as the self-reflecting layer of our home planet. With your help, I will begin to erase all boundaries, all borders, all walls, so that we may live as citizens in good standing in the commonwealth of Earth, not in separation but in union with one another.

Let us collaborate with the rest of our global family to make Earth a garden. To strengthen that collaboration, let us learn each other’s languages, customs, philosophies and ways, in a spirit of acceptance and approval. Let us read each other’s literature, listen to each other’s music, look at each other’s films, study each other’s poetry and myths, explore each other’s worldviews.

Ask not what you can do for our country. Ask what you can do to heal our planet.

Finally, I challenge us all to ascend into the expanding awareness of our fundamental spiritual nature. Courageously seek a new human definition. Imagine living in time without end. Contemplate our place among the stars. Feel that we are each an essential part of All, evolving faster, now, toward higher realms.

Joseph Dispenza is the award-winning author of 12 books, including God On Your Own and The Way of the Traveler. He is a co-founder of LifePath Retreats in San Miguel, where he lives. www.lifepathretreats.com.