Training in Nonviolence

Author(s): Mahapragna Acharya
Publisher: Anuvrat Global Organization

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Spiritual Development - a Must for Universal Peace
It is a matter of great joy for me to wish all of you increasing spiritual development at the onset of the New Year. I believe that a person's spiritual development is absolutely necessary along with his material development. Let us all resolutely assert that peace is impossible without spirituality. The first lesson of peace is the development of spiritual awareness and its practical form is ahimsa. We can find a cause-effect relationship between ahimsa and peace. Ahimsa is the cause and peace is its effect, its result. Let us not talk merely of peace, but before doing so we must assimilate ahimsa into our hearts.
The first principle of ahimsa is the purity of one's thought, purity of one's emotion and purity one's deeds. We can practise it only by experiencing it in the totality of these conditions. If we do not have a feeling of equality towards all living beings, our dream of peace will just remain a daydream. It will never become a reality. In order to change it into reality, what is needed is the inculcation of a feeling of equality towards all creatures and the practical form that emerges from it is the human solidarity. Besides the legacy of anuvrat (a campaign exhorting people to commit themselves to some basic ethical norms), Acharya Tulsi also gave us an aphorism - let us have faith in the unity of humankind. It means an attitude of equanimity, a feeling of equality towards all, considering all human beings equal. No one is small or big, no one is low or high, no one is inferior or superior. After all a human being is just a human being.
The problem of the present age is that there is rampant discrimination on the grounds of caste and social status. It is this state of inequality today that is causing unrest in the world. If we really want peace, we must first of all develop a feeling of equanimity towards all.
Peace will prevail automatically when our thought of equanimity becomes stronger. The problem today is that the behaviour of man towards man is not as humane as is expected of him. In the present age, some people are living in a state of luxury, while there are others who are not even able to get enough food to satisfy their hunger. If the social consciousness of equality had been awakened
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