Inner peace within us will help deal with violence in the world

 

Some years ago, I went to Iraq to take stock of our relief and rehabilitation work there. We were asked to stay in the Green Zone, the safe zone. There were 12 vehicles and two tankers provided for our security. They said that the Red Zone was quite risky and there had been bomb blasts a few days back. But I insisted on going there. They were worried but since I was their guest, they could not refuse. There, I went to a village that had only Shias because all the Sunnis had been driven away from there. They welcomed me. I sat and spoke with them and told them I wanted to bring a guest that evening and they agreed. So I brought with me a Sunni imam who was among those driven away from that village. When they met and spoke to each other, the villagers decided, “We will welcome back the 8,000 families that were driven away from here.”

When there is a conflict, there is a breakdown of communication. There is no trust. To bridge this gap, you need a channel of communication, a way to connect with all the sides of the conflict. There are some who are extremely sensitive and lose their temper and then there are those who think they are ‘sensible’ and righteous to such an extent that they don’t care about the impact of their actions or inactions. Neither can make good communicators. We need a blend of sensitivity and sensibility. A crucial characteristic of a peaceful person is how best he can connect with everyone.

Corruption begins where a sense of belongingness ends. You will see that people take bribes only from those they have no belongingness with. Nobody takes a bribe from their loved ones or those they connect with. Another example of connection can be, how you probably behave when you go abroad and you meet someone who says, “I also studied in XYZ College.” What happens to you? You feel a sense of connection and this connection improves communication. Then conflicts simply disappear.

‘The other’ is always a threat. But with multi-religious and multi-cultural, value-based education, the threat can disappear. Ultimately, the thought process changes when perception changes, opening the door for cooperation and peace.

We have many identities in life. First, we are part of one light, one human race. Our subsequent identities are with gender, nation, and religion. There is violence in the world because our priorities have been reversed. For these identities to be in the proper order of priority, we need inner peace so that we are sensitive to others’ needs and respond appropriately.

Glimpse of the soul

Life is full of interruptions. We need to keep moving. We park ourselves somewhere and then we move again. Now if you park in a wrong place, you need to move sooner, and if you park in the right place, you have freedom to move when you want to. Similarly, you have to park your mind in a safe place. If you have parked your mind in your own garage, nobody can tell you when you should move it. But if you park your mind in somebody else’s garage, they will be after you.

Don’t place your life’s authority in somebody else’s hand. If you do, you will have no freedom. And when you lose freedom, the next thing you lose is love and compassion, because someone who is stifled cannot express their compassion or love. So, take care of the car called mind which drives you. You should drive the mind rather than the mind driving you. Wisdom empowers you to drive the mind. Otherwise the mind is driving; it is an automated car which goes on its own. 

You are sitting, observing that while you want to go left, the car is going right, and you feel helpless. Most of our life is like this. We don’t know what we are doing, we don’t know what we want, and we don’t know where we are going. So we need to take a look at, ‘From sitting behind, how I can jump into the driving seat. How can I make that leap?’, and that is what spirituality is. The essence of the Bhagvad Gita, is “your soul is imperishable; repose in the self”.

Lord Buddha said, “Life has sorrow and sadness, but there is a way to come out of sadness.” Discontinuation of sadness and attainment of happiness both will happen through meditation. The body, the mind, and the intellect have changed, but there is something within us that has not changed. That is a glimpse of the soul.