Conflict is as old as humanity. We can’t pick up a newspaper or look at social media these days without being reminded of all the conflict and violence in the world. We may wonder why, when all humans basically want the same things for themselves and their loved ones, there is still so much violence and strife. Clearly conflict happens on many levels – within the individual, within the family, in our neighborhoods, in our country, and between nations. We may agonize about the losses of life. We may worry about our safety. We listen to the debates about gun violence and other methods of causing harm, yet we have no clarity about how to stop it.
In an interview, Sadhguru was asked how to end violence for good. Sadhguru replied, “Look at yourself as an individual and see how many moments in a day do you feel you simply cannot stand the person sitting next to you? Trying to hold yourself back is going to work only for a certain period of time. It is bound to explode somewhere when certain situations allow it because the violence is within the human being. That is the violence that needs to be attended to. If we do not put out the fires within the human being, you cannot put out the fires on the street. Today or tomorrow it will light up again.”
“Let us say tomorrow morning, I will stop all the violence on this planet. What will you do after that? Will you live absolutely fulfilled, joyful, exuberant, and fantastic? No. You will find new problems. The worst violence that is happening on the planet is in your mind…We must understand the need for violence is essentially fear. The more fearful you are the more the tendency for you to become violent. Where there is no fear, the need for violence will come down dramatically.
“So, why the fear, what is the fear about? Essentially the basis of fear is just this – in this vast expanse of creation, this cosmic space, if you are identified as a little body, this small little person in this vast cosmos, fear is natural. If you really look at it, this tiny piece of life – if you are identified only with your biological self – this tiny piece of life should shiver in terror. But transcending fear – what it means is, if you bring your life in such a way… if you allow your life to happen in a certain way to you, if your experience of life transcends the boundaries of your physicality, if you handle your body in such a way that your body is as competent as it can be in the physical world and your inner experience is beyond this physicality of who you are, you will see fear will become equanimous. If you are fit and competent and you are ready to fight the dragons, then your physical self is competent. Because of that a whole lot of fear is taken care of.
“And the other dimension is, your inner experience has transcended your physicality; then there is no fear at all. Now you have transcended violence on both levels because physical is always under threat, we need to understand this. Physical is not a permanent fixture, physical is under threat…Physicality is not an indestructible process, physicality is a fragile process. We can make it strong but it’s still a fragile process. So if these two dimensions are handled that physical competence of a certain caliber and an inner experience which is beyond physicality, fear is handled. If fear is handled, transcending violence naturally happens. It is not about fighting somebody, it is about bringing yourself to the ultimate possibility that you can bring your body and mind to; and then work on your spiritual process to transcend these two things.
“Violence does not necessarily mean you go out and kill someone. You are angry, you are irritated, you cannot sit still – this is violence. If we do not root it out from its innermost core, peace will not happen. The science of Yoga is just this: learning to harness and direct your energies in the right way, so that who you are finds its ultimate expression. If you do not allow this energy which you call as life to find its expression, it naturally tries to find its way out in violent ways. 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 human society. Is such a thing possible? Existing realities on the planet could be changed in a moment, because existing realities do not take into consideration people’s will, commitment and what is beating in the human heart. If only we can stoke that, if only we can stir up what is happening in individual hearts, peace is definitely a possibility. If we dedicate ourselves to making this happen around us, we can see something tremendous and dramatic happening on the planet in our own lifetime.”
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