'WORLD PEACE'? An Oxymoron!!

‘World peace’: This is what everyone ‘ideally’ wants right? Well to me, this term itself seems likes a massive oxymoron, unless the peace that one refers to, is directed at the world within one’s mind. And hence, the definition of ‘peace’ transforms to that of ‘serenity’. A lot of you must be familiar with the Serenity Prayer, which states:

“God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

To me, this is, if not THE complete prayer, then at least one of those that are. I might have pointed out earlier, but here I would again, that each stage in the evolutionary process of life has seemed, in the past, and still does in the present, as the worst time that could be in world history. Yet we, the mortals, are stubborn enough to manage to survive whatever way we can at best, to struggle against the misery of our times.

I have never considered the world in its physical self as the culprit, or even the human race for that matter. After all, how could creations of the Ultimate Higher Power, or God, or Allah, which in itself is such a beautiful concept, be otherwise? At least my mind fails to accept such a notion. The belief system that I adhere to, tells me that every mortal is born of God’s will, and of a pure soul. Nature, which splashes the artistic skills of God all around us, again has the ability to make even an atheist with a good functional mind and observation to eventually start believing. How then, can we say our world could be an ugly place? Well I know it is not.

To me, the anti-human activities of the ‘humans by birth’ is the bud of the evil. The butterfly effect philosophy pretty much predetermines the cause-and-effect phenomena of the vicious cycle of almost all the causes and their effects around us.

I remember having an argument with some well-read people once, where the subject was this school of thought in psychology that fear and not hate, is actually the opposite of love. How can we expect to find ‘peace’ which exists as an outer body concept, when we are unable to develop serene feelings within ourselves? Here, the need for healthy detachment again arises.

For a huge and significant part of my life, I was made to believe, both by people whose words matter(ed) and those among the ‘less-significant others’ that my sensitivity is a ‘bad’ thing for me. But with the passage of time, the conflict in my mind is dissolving and I feel it is rather a blessing than a curse. And this is primarily because only through feeling at my worst, have I learnt and am still learning, to choose what to let go of, and what to hold on to within my mind. Sometimes, when the ‘things one can’t change’ start taking over and demoting the senses (mainly the sixth sense, intuition), the best remedy is to detach oneself emotionally and psychologically from such situations.

It is only when the pain overflows and begins to break our barriers of tolerance, that we need to let our guard down and surrender to our helplessness. This way I believe, the pain begins to subside and a healthy ‘numbness’ takes its place. And this detachment from the object requiring our detaching skills, in turn gives rise to serenity.

I am by no means propagating an ‘I don’t care’ attitude, because this distancing is most needed by those who feel the most. But the ‘wisdom to know the difference’ is the key factor here, enabling us to channel our limited energies in directions that would, in physicality of the material world, help. I am aware that a lot of human energy has been wasted in first creating mountains out of molehills, and then to undo the initial self-damage done.

In my humble opinion, it is high time we start ‘seeing’ things not only with our superficial sensory gift of ‘sight’, but with the vision of the ‘insight’ a.k.a ‘wisdom’ here. Who is the victim, and who, the perpetrator?