Deepak Chopra's book, “Peace Is the Way: Bringing War and Violence to an End was inspired by a saying from Mahatma Gandhi: There is no way to peace. Peace is the way. In a world where every path to peace has proved futile, the one strategy that has not been tried is the way of peace itself. We must not bring one war to an end, or thirty, Chopra tells us, but the idea of war itself.”
Chris Hedges informs us “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.”
War has the same psychological effect on patriots, as any sporting competition has in success and failure, winning and losing, on the fan. When hostilities begin, patriots rally around the flag, regardless of whether it is right, wrong, moral, or immoral. The idea of losing always has its attendant shame and disgrace. In Iraq, everything is hunky-dory as long as there is a sense that America is winning; when there is a sense that we are losing, there is a need to bring the troops home.
For those who are the combatants’, “war forms its own culture.” Chris Hedges explains, “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by myth makers, historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists and the state -- all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty. It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death. Fundamental questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our place on the planet are laid bare when we watch those around us sink to the lowest depths. War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks just below the surface within all of us.”
War is archaically evil. We must create a new way of thinking and make necessary changes so that violence is no longer appealing. Chopra tells us, “War has become a habit. We reach for it the way a chain smoker reaches for a cigarette, promising to quit but somehow never kicking the habit.” However, Chopra also tells us that peace has its own power, and our task now is to direct that power and multiply it one person at a time.
Peace Is the Way challenges each of us to take the next leap in our evolution. You aren’t asked to be a saint, or to give up any belief. You are only asked to stop reacting out of fear, to change your allegiance from violence to peace. ... Violence may be innate in human nature, but so is its opposite: love. The next stage of humanity, the leap which we are poised to take, will be guided by the force of that love. This is more than a hope or an aspiration. It is a new way of being in the world, giving each individual the power to end war in our time.
We must provide the leadership and be mentors for peace, creating memes for the evolution of peace.
Peace is the way. Do not let war be the force that gives us meaning, peace can also be the force that gives us meaning, for it is the natural way. Just as war forms its own culture, so can we create a culture of peace.
It is a new way of thinking.
“Be the change you want to see in the world.”
(Mohandas Gandhi)
