Speech at the Mirapuri World Peace Festival 2010, 10.7.2010
If we want to dive into a future that is happy on the long run we have to bring about a total change of social, political, financial, emotional and spiritual climate. This is no small feat to be accomplished and will in time profoundly change our way of life. It will gradually result in the birth of a new culture that is necessarily based on love, trust and collaboration. It will be a reshaping of things and processes and of attitudes. In the course of this work we have to review everything in life and assess its status. Some things will belong to the past and should be placed there to rest in peace. Other things will be found wanting but capable of change, while only few, if any, are already headed towards the future. The future is full of as yet unrealized possibilities, and only if the future lives up to its possibilities will it be a happy future.
One of those many things to be reviewed is the way people interact. This happens on a great number of levels. Interaction takes place whenever two or more people meet, be it physically, on the phone or in the internet. And even if we read a poem of a long dead rhymester an interaction occurs. Interaction is involved in war and in peace as well as in love and in hate. What makes interaction a crucial art in the history of mankind and on our way towards the future is its quality.
On a certain level it can be said, that wars for instance are caused by greed or by the wish for domination and power. But on closer inspection we can see, that the roots of war run deeper. They have their hold in the way we see other people. If they mean nothing to us, or if we are indifferent to them, disgusted by them or if we hate them, war and strife are always waiting to raise their ugly heads. If on the other hand we love and respect our fellow men there is no place for these distortions of true humanity.
Of course, this isn’t war’s deepest root. That would be Weiterlesen