On International Day Of Peace September 21, Reflecting On Why Do We Lose Our Peace?

Today, each one of us is seeking peace, aren’t we? The primary reason for this is our dilemma and difficulty in surviving in a world that seems to be permeated with conflicts of all sorts. We find irreconcilabilities at all levels of society. From the family dinner table to the floors of parliament, discord has become the norm rather than the exception. Even man’s own mind is like a house divided against itself. Obviously, this is not a happy state of affairs. One, therefore, wants to know what is wrong with the functioning of man that has led him to lose his peace.

When we attempt to understand the nature of man and the state of society, we find that all actions of man are driven by one or another of his four basic desires. One of these desires concerns the fulfilment of physical or economic needs, including food, clothing, and shelter. To fulfil these desires, man requires money or wealth. But the difficulty is that man does not stop at fulfilling these basic needs; his desire for comforts takes the form of greed, and that is when the real struggle begins. What begins as a reasonable want quietly transforms into an insatiable hunger, one that no amount of accumulation can satisfy. This unchecked desire of man has caused the class war or the conflict between the ‘Haves’ and ‘Have-nots’. Besides these material needs, man also has emotional needs; he seeks love, care, attention, and understanding and desires to live an honorable life. But when he stretches these desires to an extreme, his longings for prestige, position, privilege, and power turn into jealousy, hatred, and other negative emotions, bringing him into further conflict with others. It is this unbridled desire that has led society to a power struggle, resulting in cold wars, armed conflicts, and the endless craving for military supremacy. The peculiarity of all this is that, despite this, man desires to be freed from conflict and to regain his peace. He longs for peace, liberation, or freedom.

Many of us are not aware of the fact that peace is truly our original nature. Much like how a river’s nature is to flow clear, our deepest nature is one of stillness and calm. However, when we arrive on earth and act through human bodies, we lose our original energy in the cycle of action and interaction with proximate matter and souls. When we strip away our original positive energies, negativity manifests in our minds and then in our actions, resulting in suffering. When there is suffering, we desperately seek our original, truly peaceful, and blissful state of being. However, our efforts to attain that peace are limited by certain human constraints, the first and foremost being the constraint of the human body. It is due to our attachment to the body, its relations, and its possessions that the five vices enter our minds. The first fallout of this is that we lose our peace of mind, joy, and power. All our actions become tainted by either lust, ego, greed, anger, or attachment. We become trapped in a cycle of karmic bondage, helplessly seeking liberation from these vices so that we can regain our peaceful state.

Peace is, in fact, a corollary of purity. When the mind is cleared of all impurities, peace and happiness naturally dwell there. This is not a distant philosophical ideal, it is an inner housekeeping that each of us is capable of undertaking. But the biggest question is: How does one achieve this? The answer is simple. First, we need to understand that peace is a composite phenomenon. We cannot hope to live in peace without wishing the same for our neighbors. Therefore, our positive actions that ensure peace for ourselves, society, and the environment can alone generate and sustain universal peace. Such actions can only result when we understand our relationship with the Supreme, who is the creator, director, and actor and is beyond all limitations that bind us. He never comes under the bondage of matter and karma, or of life and death. He has an abundance of peace, love, and happiness, so he never has any personal desires. It is precisely this unconditional, desireless state that makes HIM the most reliable source of true and lasting peace. Thus, he can and does restore peace on earth when all human efforts at creating peace fail. With this divine knowledge, the road to spiritual endeavor and the attainment of our original peaceful state opens up! Remember: unless we make peace with ourselves, we cannot re-establish peace on earth.