Let There Be Peace on Earth
Over many centuries, our world has witnessed epic and countless instances of wars, conflicts, and opposition. Throughout this, there existed the peerless and rarest people among us who preached and practiced theories of peace and encouraged us all to evolve into more enlightened people coexisting harmoniously on our planet.
World peace is defined as an ideal of freedom, peace, and happiness among and within all nations and/or people. It generally includes an idea of planetary nonviolence by which nations willingly cooperate, either voluntarily or by virtue of a system of governance that prevents warfare. Today, peace has predominantly become political work toward the settlement of issues between nations through military involvement, cessation of arms and weapons, and dialogue on less violent civilian matters. Peace has also included some humanitarian efforts that stretch its helping hands to embattlement-torn regions in our world.
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When thinking about peace, this idea does not mean an absence of conflict, as differences among people have always been and will always be present. It means solving our differences with peaceful acts such as dialogue, education, knowledge, and humanitarian acts.
We are all human beings sharing one planet, our Earth. Whether we want to or not, we must learn to coexist with forethought and in loving ways, or we are failing as human beings.
We must also accept the ways of our hearts to find peace. By accepting love, compassion, justice, forgiveness, mindfulness, tolerance, and peace into our spirits, we strive to become better people who are more balanced, tolerant, and loving. We must work on accepting and tolerating one another’s differences while searching for peace. This is important when living in loving tolerance of each other in order to seek and find peace within our hearts and spirits.
We must remember that intolerance leads to hatred and division when addressing peacefulness. We must teach our children that dialogue, not violence, is the best and most practical way to solve conflict. Our children and future generations are responsible for ensuring that our world becomes a more peaceful place for all. The educational systems of our future should be a place where greater emphasis is placed on strengthening human abilities, such as warm-heartedness, a sense of oneness, and love.
With greater clarity, we must see that our spiritual well-being depends not only on religion but also on our innate human nature, our natural affinity for goodness, compassion, and caring for others. Whether or not we belong to a religion or some spiritual practice, we all have a fundamental and profoundly innate sense of morals and ethics within our spirits. We need to nurture this shared innate sense. Ethics, as opposed to religion, are grounded within our nature and humanity. This is how we are connected and can work on ourselves and our spiritual growth. Religion, spirituality, and ethics put into practice may be a magical combination to finding out how to coexist with each other peacefully. If empathy is the basis of human coexistence, it shows that human development relies on cooperation, not competition. Cooperation in loving-kindness, compassion, and a new way of being is a way that cuts straight to the heart of what it is to be human. We each have the ability and capacity to be the bridge to peace and an instrument of calm.
We must learn now that humanity is all one. We are all connected physically, mentally, and emotionally. We, as humanity, still focus far too much on our differences instead of our commonalities. Again, we must live in loving tolerance of each other’s differences in order to find peace. It is more important now than ever to understand this.
Today, political leaders take peace into their own hands and play a role in making or breaking our nation’s policies. Nations engage in dialogue and negotiations to try and calm their ethnic problems and border issues. Political, diplomatic, and media powers contribute to this peace process, but hatred always seems to dominate the effort.
More than half of the fighting occurring today is caused by and among warring religious groups. Inter-religion and intra-religion differences are not new, but extreme political and religious differences complicate these wars. Loving tolerance is again the theme that needs to be played out among these warring groups who are failing to find peaceful ways to address and solve their different ideologies and views.
The central power of peace for all people and all nations may lie in the practice of spirituality. Resorting to the spiritual ways of seeking inner peace helps bring peacefulness to all who seek it. The gap between inner peace and global peace should be filled with a path of nonviolence and a better understanding of the messages we should all strive for concerning global peace.
Peace and nonviolence are the two pillars of any peace process that upholds the human race’s livelihood. They are inseparable. It must be the fruit of any nonviolent action or protest. Global peace has been hindered by many challenges that include both natural and human-made causes.
The rationale behind achieving peace is the positive understanding of give and take, humanity, forgiveness, and nonviolence. Understanding this will help put people on the correct path toward peacefulness. We cannot have enemies if we make peace with our opponents. It is that simple.
To strive to live in great peace on our planet, we can have a vision of spiritual and social unity. We must all find a place where we genuinely identify and care for one another rather than simply tolerate each other’s existence. Peace starts within every one of us. When there is peace within ourselves, we can have peace around us. Perhaps we have been growing and evolving as human beings long enough now and have the capabilities to find peace, live in peace, and be peace.
If we look at a thesaurus, it has 579 antonyms or words that are the “opposite of peace” in it. This covers everything from war to conflict, hatred, unrest, agitation, pain, agony, anger, and more than 570 other feelings. As spiritual beings, we allow many things like these antonyms to disturb our peace. For some reason, it seems that anything that activates our sadness, anger, or fear has the potential to disturb peacefulness and peaceful ways.
We can reach a state of peace in many ways. Fundamentally, peace comes when we stop thinking thoughts that disturb us.
We can achieve this through distraction or temporarily forgetting about something, or we can address the issue and transform the situation. We can also visit peace through the practice of regular meditation. Regular visits through meditation put the ups and downs of life into perspective, even the highs and lows of the emotional roller coaster, and connect us to the peace within our spirits.
In life, peace comes more consistently when what we think, feel, say, and do are in alignment. This happens when we are true to ourselves in how we live, and we live life according to what is important and what we value and believe.
Peace is also quite dynamic, constantly changing, and actively progressing. It is not merely the absence of worldly conflict. As a place we can all visit and experience peace. We can also visit a peaceful meditation in our minds and hearts when we calm our thoughts or connect with something that frees us from what is bothering us.
Being peaceful requires daily courage. The pursuit of it challenges us to address situations daily as they come up. Sometimes, that means we have to look deep within and let things that are bothering us go from our consciousness. It may mean we have to take action, and in other cases, it may challenge us to have a conversation or even change our viewpoint when interacting with others. All of this takes courage and effort. This applies to people, companies, organizations, teams, and countries. As life changes, we change and grow from what is happening. Life can make us bitter, broken, or better. Peace means always choosing better. Peace, like happiness, is always an inside job.
Spending time on what is important to ourselves and being true to that conviction of peace is key to our inner peace. Only our hearts can tell us what that means. Peace is personal to every human being on this planet.
Peace is not always something we can create; peace is not something that happens. Peace is something that should always be present. Generally, the peace that we achieve is only about making ourselves comfortable. When we look at the mountains, we are peaceful. If an elephant suddenly rushes out of the forest straight toward us—we can lose all our peace. This peace is of no great significance. It is better to be agitated because if we are agitated, at least we will search to find this happy state again.
Peace means something in our universe. It can sometimes be something that we create and something that happens. But peace can also be something that always is. What happens on the surface of our lives is superficial to the development of our spirits. This is just like the ocean. On the ocean’s surface, we will see waves and tremendous turbulence. But if we go deep down, it is perfectly peaceful below the surface. The fundamental quality of existence is always peace.
To be peaceful is the ultimate goal because when we are peaceful and joyful, our bodies and minds work their best—and this is the basic parameter for success on our planet. Our efficiency and productivity do not depend on our desire to do something. It is dependent on our capability. Our capability becomes impaired when we are in some state of unhappiness, frustration, or depression. Because of this duality, peace affects our state of mind and our ability to accomplish other goals in our lives by ourselves, each other, and the world.
If we could become more peaceful, gentle, and caring in all our interactions with other beings and the world, then we could all enjoy a culture of peace. Yet, to achieve such a goal is not always easy. To do so requires effort, resolve, patience, cooperation, and practice.
We must stop thinking of peace as some distant and perhaps unachievable goal and make it our goal right now. Our spiritual development hinges on finding peace on this planet, which is why addressing it is so desperately important. Ultimately, we must remember these words: “There is no path to peace; peace is the path.”
Special Thanks to:
Make up: Bernard Ichkanian
Photography: Greg Doherty
Editing: Dina Morrone
Feature photos: Giulia Lupetti
Alexia Melocchi
Nunzia Giannattasio Springer
Natalie Marukian
Mila Khalatian
Annabelle Bergold
Zaydin Carlson
Zayyan Carlson
Samantha Elain Hazle
Sophia Victoria Hazle
Tazio Fardellone
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