What is Peace and Who Wants it?
Most people in this world
would say they want peace – peace for the world and peace for
themselves. Even the arms dealers and profiteers of war will say
they want peace for themselves. That is why they do what they do,
even at the expense of others, because they think that the wealth and
power that war and the sale of weapons will bring them will enable
then to find peace.
So really I am asking about personal
peace, not “just” the absence of war, for even when we are not
directly involved with war, we may not be feeling peace.
It is the feeling
of peace and the joy that it
brings, that we seek.
Even if we are fortunate enough, as
many are, to be able to go to a place away from the rest of the world
– a bedroom, the garden shed, the riverside, a cave or even a WC,
where nobody will disturb us for a while, we may still not feel
peace. We may still suffer from the problems and worries that we
each carry in our heads. Even when we eventually find sleep, we may
suffer from the dreams and nightmares that our minds create. Plus of
course, we cannot stay in that place for ever.
Many people
say they are troubled by the incessant thoughts – the noise – in
our own minds even when we they are alone. They want their mind to
shut up, to stop. They may be lucky to get away from the hassles of
the world for a while but they cannot escape their own minds.
The
mind of course is a useful tool that w need to get through life in
the best possible way. But it is like a horse pulling a chariot in
which you are the passenger. It’s fine so long as we can control
where the horse pulls us. We can go to beautiful or even dreadful
places; we can turn round sometimes and go back to some place we
liked.
The problem can be, however, that we have to stop
steering the horse sometimes, to eat, sleep or focus on something
else. But that horse is not capable of stopping (maybe it’s just a
mechanical horse with no off switch and it doesn’t need to eat or
sleep!). It just carries on.
By
that I mean that horse, which is our own minds, will not rest, even
when we want it to, it just babbles on, giving is fears, regrets,
anger, wishful thinking, whatever, about the past or the future, or
telling us how bad or uncomfortable the now (our life) is.
So
people may look for ways to stop it: meditation, exercise, drugs etc
or ways to temporarily distract us from it.
If only we
could stop listening
to the babble, the noise, could we then find peace?
My
answer is yes.
I believe, based upon my own life
experience and the belief that I am nobody special, that every human
being carries those feelings of peace and joy within us. I believe
that in those moments that we do feel peace and joy, we feel it
within, not because we have created it but because there is that
place there within us all the time.
So I believe that
everybody should seek those experiences, as everybody does, know it
or not, but that we should seek the place within where we
feel.
There are many
people and teachers in the world, many books and videos, many ideas
and philosophies, that tell us how to find peace and I believe we
need to look at some of them – we need to try.
Some
people believe that they can
find t themselves, if only
they could make the world around them exactly the way they want it.
And many people that have
made the world around them the way they wanted it have realised that
what they wanted was not entirely correct as they still lack
peace.
I am fortunate enough to have had the means, the
techniques, to enable me to look within and focus as best I can, in
such a way that it brings we peace and joy, shown to me, fifty years
ago now, and it works for me. That is why I tell others about my
teacher. For some it may work, for others it may not. Some may go
on to seek peace in some other way and I hope they find it. It is
like finding hungry people and offering them a free plate of food.
Some will just say no for whatever reason, some may eat it and move
along, some may not even like the taste. Some may even get the
recipe book and produce their own ingredients. All I can do is
offer.
And who was that who gave me what I consider to be
the best thing in my life, the greatest Knowledge, the greatest
truth? His name is Prem Rawat.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1838440127
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