Way to Peace

By Swami Atmashraddhananda

Peace is an inner urge of the human psyche. Every storm seeks subsidence in calm. This book represents an in-depth study of peace by a number of experts who have had practical experience in handling problems created by lack of peace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9781329307353

Book preview

Jitatmananda

INVOCATION

पृथिवी शान्तिरन्तरिक्षं शान्तिर्द्यौः

शान्तिरापः शान्तिरोषधयः

शान्तिर्वनस्पतयः शान्तिर्विश्‍वे

मे देवाः शान्तिः सर्वे मे देवाः शान्तिः

शान्तिः शान्तिः शान्तिभिः । ताभिः

शान्तिभिः सर्वं शान्तिभिः शमयामोहं

यदिह घोरं यदिह क्रूरं यदिह पापं

तच्छान्तं तच्छिवं सर्वमेव शमस्तु नः ।

May the earth be peaceful. May the atmosphere be peaceful May the sky be peaceful. May the waters be peaceful. May the herbs be peaceful. May all the gods grant me peace. May each god grant me peace. May through peace every being attain peace. May through all these forms of peace I attain blessedness, Whateves is dreadful, whatever is cruel, whatever is sinful in this world—may they all become peaceful. May everything confer blessedness upon us.

—Atharva-Veda, 19.9.14

PEACE

Swami Vivekananda

(This poem was composed by Swami Vivekananda at Ridgely Manor in Ulster County, USA, on 21 September 1899. Swamiji wrote this poem on the day Sister Nivedita decided to wear the nun's garb and handed it to her on her return from a drive in the evening.)

Behold, it comes in might,

The power that is not power;

The light that is in darkness,

The shade in dazzling light.

It is joy that never spoke,

And grief unfelt, profound,

Immortal life unlived,

Eternal death unmourned.

It is not joy nor sorrow,

But that which is between,

It is not night nor morrow,

But that which joins them in.

It is sweet rest in music;

And pause in sacred art,

The silence between speaking;

Between two fits of passion—

It is the calm of heart.

It is beauty never seen,

And love that stands alone,

It is song that lives unsung,

And knowledge never known.

It is death between two lives,

And lull between two storms,

The void whence rose creation,

And that where it returns.

To it the tear-drop goes,

To spread the smiling form.

It is the goal of life,

And Peace—its only home!

PROLOGUE.

THE PEACE THAT ABIDES

Puṇyasya phalam icchanti puṇyam necchanti mānavā

Na pāpaphalam icchanti pāpam kurvanti yatnata

MEN long for the rewards of merit, but perform no meritorious deeds; they shun the wages of sin, but commit sin assiduously—wails the poet. Peace too is in the same wilderness. We crave for peace; for, consciously or subconsciously, we know that without peace there can be no bliss—asāntasya kutaḥ sukham But then we do not genuinely work for peace. We profess to avoid conflicts, but take to conflict like duck to water.

Why this strange paradox? Why this in-built itch in human nature to fight? No doubt animals fight. But animals fight only for food or mate. Food they must have for self-preservation and mate they must have for the preservation of the race. For these two vital needs they jump into the fray, but not otherwise. They never fight for fighting's sake, unlike man. Aristotle calls man a rational animal, but man uses the reasoning power with which God has endowed him, in curious ways. On the one hand he has built up a marvellous culture and civilization that has made human life gloriously rich. Starting his career a million years ago just like animals living in caves, he discovered the use of fire, began using tools, developed agriculture, started living a communal life in villages, built towns and cities, invented reading and writing to transmit knowledge across time and space, set up governments and drew up laws and regulations. Then came modern science and technology that have metamorphosed our lives beyond recognition. The comforts and luxuries, facilities and powers we enjoy are not dreamt of even in the Arabian Nights. And yet we are not happy. Tension mounts at all levels. Confrontations at every stage. Material progress has been at the expense of mental peace. Unrest marks the life of the individual and the family, the society and the nation. Chaos is king in international relations. Violence erupts in the most unexpected quarters. Fear haunts us from moment to moment. Fights, big and small, drain our energy and make peace a mirage and a mockery. Nuclear, chemical and bacteriological missiles bid fair to wipe the homo sapiens itself off the face of the earth. The sardonic invitation of our runaway civilization is to the peace of the grave.

Let us, for a change, examine why we use our rationality so irrationally. What makes us restless, what goads us to fight, why are we violent, what do we seek? Strange as it may sound, all our desires are essentially the desire for peace. Calm is the finale of every storm. But the mistake we make, the error we persist in, is that to gain peace we pursue unpeaceful ways. We do not realize that the means adopted must always be in consonance with the end. By sowing thistles we cannot hope to reap corn. So we must see what drives us on a detour from the paths of peace.

As Sri Ramakrishna, the noblest monument of peace and harmony we have had in recent times, points out, it is Kamini-Kanchana, the lure of lust and lucre that leads us astray. Not that he was against women or wealth. Women he worshipped as manifestations of the Divine Mother, and wealth he described as a sign of God's grace. What he castigated was the greed to possess flesh and property. It is possessiveness, the itch to get and to hold, that dehumanizes us. Our minds get agitated, we lose our balance. We fight against those who stand in the way, we stoop low to win, we create misery all around and wriggle in misery ourselves. Sri Ramakrishna tells us the parable of the osprey that was able to snatch a piece of meat. It was hotly chased by other birds equally anxious to snatch away that lump of flesh. Finally, in utter disgust and sheer helplessness, the osprey let the bit of meat drop from its beak. The other birds at once went after the dropping piece, leaving the osprey in full peace. Āsā hi paramam duḥkham, nairāsyam paramam sukham. Craving is the greatest source of sorrow, desirelessness is the greatest happiness.

Kāma, the thirst to get, must be transmuted into Prema, the love that delights in giving. Hence the Upanishad exhorts us tena tyaktena bhunj thā, enjoy by giving up. mā gṛdhaḥ, don't grab, kasya svid dhanam, whose indeed is wealth? The tendency to grab will go only when we realize that all wealth really belongs to God. So sā vāsyam idam sarvam yat kiñca jagatyām jagat—envelop with the spirit of the Divine everything moving in this world of change. We are His children, amrtasya putrāh, and so are heirs to the whole cosmos. Everything in the universe is His and so ours. Why then be petty-minded and fight for trifles? Develop the broadest mind. Nālpe sukham asti —In the little there is no happiness. Bhūmaiva sukham. Bliss is in the vast. Claim your patriomony of the immense by discarding the avarice for the petty. A Janaka could declare anantam bata me vittam, my wealth is boundless, yasya me nāsti kiñcana, for I own nothing. When we have nothing we have everything. When we do not clench our fist over a tinsel, we have infinity in the open palm. We suffer because of the mistaken notion that the purpose of life is to get and keep. We do not understand that thereby we only turn ourselves into slaves of desire. Bhogā na bhuktā vayam eva bhuktāh, chuckles the poet. It is not that sense objects have been enjoyed by us. On the contrary, we have been enjoyed by the sense objects. Hankering for the objects of the senses, we lose our equipoise. The consequent agitation we misinterpret as a richer tempo of life. We do not see that what is increasing is only dissatisfaction. Vṛddhāyām mṛgatṛṣṇāyām kim ānando jalārthinā! If the mirage becomes vaster in area is it any joy to the thirsty traveller? His thirst can be quenched only through real water, never through a painted picture of an aqueous expanse. Peace indeed can be had, not by chasing the horizon, but by being svastha, firm in one's own place. A disturbed state of body or mind is called asvāsthyam, not being in one's proper position. And the most proper position for us is to be centred in God, instead of in our petty selves. The farther away we move from God, our real centre, the greater is our distance from peace.

Being in God, being at the centre, does not, however, mean being inert like stocks and stones. There is, on the contrary, tremendous activity at the centre, only it is full of peace and blessedness. It is activity in unison with God's purpose and so tension-free. He gives the power heeded for the work allotted to us, so we do not have to worry how the task can be accomplished. Yogaksemam vahāmyaham, declares the Lord. He looks after the Yoga and the Ksema, the acquiring and the preserving. It is only our arrogant ignorance that makes us think that ours is the accomplishment. When the conviction gets rooted that we are only instruments in His hands, as a pen is in the hands of a poet, peacelessness vanishes without a trace even as dense darkness when a lamp is lit.

It may be objected that all this holds good only for the individual. An earnest aspirant can, no doubt, strive to lead a selfless life, doing everything as Īsvarārpaṇa, dedicated to God. Thereby he may be filled with peace. But how can this strategy work in the case of world peace? Can the colossal problem of a high tech civilisation reeling on the brink of a horrendous cataclysm be solved through a sermon on unselfishness? This sincere doubt is based on a pitiable myopia, an inability to see beyond one's nose. It arises from a misunderstanding of what the world is. The external world is not an entity different from and confronting the internal world, our mind. What we see without is but a reflection of what we are within. When an object in front of a mirror gets transformed the image in the mirror cannot remain as it was, it too must exhibit the same transformation. When an individual re-orients his outlook and activities and becomes a centre of peace, his influence becomes infectious. Peace radiates from him and those who come in contact with him cannot help getting a dose of peace. Just as the atomic reactor initiates a chain reaction culminating in the release of tremendous energy, the peace-reactor also starts a chain-reaction whereby large numbers of men and women become peace-oriented.

What is desperately needed is faith. We must have the unshakable conviction that peace is our essential nature and all our ways shall be paths of peace. We shall not be traitors to our inner light, we shall deal with all our fellow men and women only in a spirit of