A Culture of Peace – By Sadhguru, Isha Foundation

With all the faculties bestowed upon human beings, you would think human beings are the most harmonious beings on earth. But if you look at history until now, the world has never really been peaceful. People have been fighting for food, for wealth, for faith and belief systems, over boundaries; we have always found an excuse to fight. The way human beings are right now, if you take away one problem in the world, another is bound to evolve.

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 entertainment in the world.

If we look at the situation we are setting up right now in the world, we have laid the foundations to ensure that there is no peace on this planet. There are various aspects to it. One important aspect is that we are making economics the most important part of human life. Once you make economics the most important thing, fighting is inevitable. As the resources on the planet are limited, with our lives being driven by the engine of economics, war is inevitable, peace is impossible.

In pursuit of economic wellbeing, today’s societies are filled with enormous amounts of violence; our very existence is violence. Just the very way we move, just the very way we do things in our lives is becoming violent. Once in a way it is bound to spill over on the street. If you look at yourself as an individual and see, how many moments in a day can you not stand the person who is sitting next to you. You, trying to hold yourself back, is going to work only for a certain period of time; somewhere it is bound to explode.

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 in the social and world situations? 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 large segments of society. Peace not in just terms of avoiding war, but establishing an active culture of living in peace in the world.

Ranked amongst the fifty most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and bestselling author. Sadhguru has been conferred the “Padma Vibhushan“, India’s highest annual civilian award, by the Government of India in 2017, for exceptional and distinguished service.