Sourcing peace
Given all the faculties bestowed upon human beings including that of reason, you would think human beings are the most harmonious beings on earth. But if you look at history, the world has never really been peaceful. People have been fighting for food, for wealth; they have been fighting over boundaries and over faith and belief systems.
We have always found an excuse to fight. If you take away one problem in the world, another is bound to crop up.
The world is not a globe; the world is its people. If we do not work for individual transformation, if we do not look for ways of making the individual peaceful, talking about world peace is just one more way of beguiling ourselves in this world of our own making.
If we look at the situation we are setting up right now in the world, we will see that we have done things that ensure that there is no peace on this planet. We have, as it were, laid the foundation for strife and unpeace. There are many aspects to this “foundation”. One important aspect is that we have made economics the most vital part of human life. Once you make economics the most vital part, fighting is inevitable. Since the resources on the planet are limited, when our lives are being driven by the engine of economics, war is inevitable, peace impossible.
In the pursuit of economic wellbeing, today’s societies are filled with enormous amounts of violence; our very existence is violence. The very way we move, the very way we do things in our lives is becoming violent. It is bound to spill over into the street. If you look at yourself as an individual, you can see how many moments in a day you cannot stand the person who is sitting next to you.
Right now the world community is sitting on a disastrous foundation. Peace is something that people have not even tasted within themselves. Then how can we expect it on the social and global planes? Unless we are willing to work to change the foundations on which the world community is built, peace is not a possibility.
It is not slogans and statements that will bring peace to the world, but a lifelong striving to produce peaceful human beings. On all levels of our human societies if we work for creating peaceful humans, people who have some sense of wholeness within themselves, they definitely will let peace percolate to larger segments of society. Peace not just in terms of avoiding war, but establishing an active culture of living in peace in the world.
Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev is a visionary, a humanitarian, author, poet and speaker
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