We can’t stop war

We can’t stop war but we can cultivate inner peace.

Have you noticed how difficult it is to stop anything?

War, that is fighting between countries and groups, seems to proliferate irrespective of the activity of stop war or stop the war campaigns.

We have a war against drugs but, if anything, the problem is getting worse not better.

We want to stop cutting down the rain forests because we ‘know’ they are the lungs of the planet but we can’t make a lot of difference even when we ‘know’ that we are endangering our survival as a species.

I put know in quotes because the Chinese have a saying: ‘to know and not to do, is not to know’. For me this speaks to the difference between ‘head knowing’ which does not lead to action, and ‘heart knowing’ that does produce action.

The neurologist Donald Calne puts it brilliantly in his book Within Reason: “The essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action while reason leads to conclusions.” More emotion equals more action.

Given that around 50% of humanity is not very good with emotions or heart knowing yet, it is not surprising that their intellectual reasoning is making little difference.

Many of us have a war going on inside of us between our head and our heart that we are not aware of. Until we can cultivate inner peace, the inner war will continue. It will continue to spread into our outer world.

So the more we cultivate inner peace, the less we will need to fight, in our relationships, families, communities and organisations. And the less we will feel the need to be at war with anyone.

Comments

[Ken Lutton]

this artical emulates the title of this site. "first inner peace, then world peace"