Is It Possible To Save Anyone?

No.
—and that’s usually where the conversation would end. However, seeing as you took the time to click on this article, I thought I’d at least expand my rationale and justify my argument…

Who brought you here to read this? Why did you click on it? Did someone tell you to read this article? Did I tell you to read it? Was there something inside of you that was curious enough to give it a look? (Thanks for that, by the way…)

Whatever your reasoning for why you are here, you are here. Reading this of your own volition.

Now, let’s imagine I say something very profound, like “You need to stop smoking.” “Lose some weight or else you’re going to get sick.” “The path to enlightenment is in watching your own attachments.” Are you going to do it? And if so, who is the one who "did it" in the first palce? It certainly wasn’t me. I simply wrote this article and left it up online to proliferate.

What you’ll quickly come to realize is that everything begins and ends with you. Sure, you can be force-fed; forced to stop-doing-something; pretty much forced to do anything — but is being forced to do something real change or fake? And if that energy forcing you to do something suddenly stopped, would you still continue to do what it made you do against your will?

You see, we can quickly become so enamoured by our own self improvement that we will want to change the world. I wanted to change the world once. Until I realized this. The key to self improvement is in the “self”. Through practice, patience and perserverence, we have achieved some level of self improvement for ourselves and (after that) we suddenly became expectant of others to follow in our footsteps and not their own. You, yourself, changed you and now you're asking someone else to change, not by themselves, but by your intervention? That seems a bit contradictory, no?

The truth is you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. You can be shown the door, but it's up to you to walk through it. We are only deluding ourselves or (worse) elevating ourselves to some higher-up pedestal in hopes of changing others — even if we do have the good intention of “awakening” them — as we push for "a better world". However, in the end, the only one who needs to become awake is you. So much so that you are awake to even your own inability to spread awakedness!

All we can really do is be exemplars of our own truth; our own raison d'être*. And if we so happen to inspire others by being ourselves, then we can share what it is that we do know — from our own experience — and not from what we think others should do in order to "become better like us". After all, "better" is nothing more than a matter of perspective, as far as I know...

But heck… what do I know, anyways?