Love this quote. A spiritual teacher, disguised as a friend, sent it to me.

You are not just an individual. You are culture incarnate. As an evolving self, you are the manifestation of a collective conditioned way of seeing and responding to life. This is why your conscious evolution matters so much. When you, as an individual, start using your own will to activate higher potentials within yourself, in a small but not insignificant way cultural evolution starts happening through you. A momentum is generated—a vertical momentum toward that which is new. And when the individual feels that momentum, it’s experienced as liberation. Most of us live in what I call a horizontal plane—an emotional and psychological and cultural worldspace that is made up only of what has already happened and what already exists. We rarely, if ever, experience true verticality, which is the rising up and emergence of that which is new. So when vertical momentum is generated, you realize that you are going somewhere at the level of consciousness. And it’s not just you; to some degree, culture itself is moving through you. When you know that’s possible and you experience it directly, it’s like someone has given you the key that unlocks the door to the future.