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peace
Inspiration
Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi is awarded the prestigious Gandhi-King Award for Non-Violence.
The quest for happiness in the material world is the cause of people's suffering and lack of inner peace. This affects not only the individual but also society as a whole.
Because of humanity's quest for happiness in external things, real love has disappeared. Joy and peace have vanished from family life. People have lost their ability to love and to serve others with open hearts. Husbands desire other women, and wives desire other men. It has gone so far that in their excessive desire for pleasure, there are men who forget that their own daughters are their daughters. Even the concept of the brother-sister relationship is crumbling. Countless children are being murdered.
The reason for all this evil we see in the world today is the misconception that happiness can be found externally.
People seek happiness in things of which the essential nature is not happiness at all. They go from one object to another. Thinking that you can get happiness from an external object is just an illusion of the mind. In truth, there is no happiness to be found in anything outside. The happiness you long for lies within you. God has given us a body, senses, and intelligence, so that we can learn this lesson and search for the real source of bliss. If we use our senses indiscriminately, we will experience only suffering instead of the happiness we expect.
For those who crave only selfish pleasures and live without any restraints, the result will be ruin. It is natural that desires and emotions arise in the mind, but some restraint is necessary. It is natural to feel hungry, but we don't eat whenever we see something edible. If we did, we would get sick. Likewise, the craving for excessive pleasures leads to suffering. People don't realize this. The pleasure they get from the senses actually comes from within themselves. People chase frantically after external happiness until they collapse in a state of suffering and despair. Then they get up, again run around and again collapse.
If you go in search of external pleasures only, you won't find peace in life. You have to learn to look inward, for that is where real bliss is to be found. But you won't find that bliss until your mind's outward leaps are stopped and the mind becomes still. In the depth of the ocean there are no waves. Similarly, you will find that the mind automatically becomes still as you enter into the depths of your mind. Then there is only bliss.
Ammachi
Find out more about women for peace at The Global Peace Initiative of Religious and Spiritual Women Leaders
Contents / Introduction / Prayers / Peace or Conflict / Peaceful Relations / Peace Issues / Conflict / Reconciliation / Peace Initiatives / Messengers of Peace / Summary / Inspiration / Real Peace /Resources
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