Peace and happiness are very much like conjoined twins or two
sides of the same coin, whatever way you like to look at them. One pulls along
the other. They are also the most sought after state of being that everybody
yearns for and works towards. People embark on different paths to achieve these
twins. Some work their bottoms off to create wealth and find happiness in their
professional success and money and others travel to exotic destinations to be
closer to nature than they would ordinarily be and find happiness in those
experiences. Some embrace sport as a way of life and find happiness in the
adrenalin rush that it gives while some find the happiness and rush in food,
drinks and other indulgences.
However, in spite of all this effort and the multiple paths
people take, they realise that they sometimes end up with inner pieces and not
inner peace. People who work hard many a time work too hard and burn their
health up in the process. So much so that the Japs have coined a term ‘Karoshi’
for it, which translates to death by overwork. People who travel extensively
have hidden health risks or social consequences. People in sports suffer
injuries and people who indulge get addicted. So how do we attain this inner
peace without the resultant side effects? Well, we don’t! Because peace and
happiness cannot be achieved as they are already within you. Remember the blog
‘You are already happy’ that I wrote two years ago? (http://kingkongsfft.blogspot.in/2015/09/you-are-already-happy.html) This write-up is more of a supplement
to it.
The irony of the whole situation is that the words ‘inner
peace’ themselves signify that the peace is there somewhere inside all of us.
But we always tend to look for it outside. That is human fallacy. We always
love a challenge. We like to assume that anything that we are looking for is
hidden in some elusive Shangri-La which nobody knows the whereabouts of. Peace
is also one such unfortunate item. The day we decide to look inside our self
and contemplate upon our self, the path to inner peace will reveal itself. We
do not need to stand in some convoluted yoga asana for hours together as the sages
do in epic movies. We just need to peel
off the layers of self-doubt and ego to attain inner peace. We are all
basically like onions and if we peel off the non-palatable skin and layers we
will end up with the fresh heart.
Peeling off the layers of ego and self-doubt is not as easy
as peeling an onion for the evening curry though. We run away from
relinquishing self-doubt and ego without fail. It takes the concerted effort of
self and an outside force, usually a teacher or a coach to work towards that. The
task of losing one’s ego is like pushing two magnets with the same polarity towards
each other. They will repel each other vehemently. We will resist any attempt
to break our ego and self-doubt because we feel that we are losing our self by
doing that. This is because we as humans identify with our ego than with our
true self. That is why a majority of the people who are requested to describe
themselves will inordinately describe what job they do, where they live and
what they have accomplished and not utter a word of what kind of people they
are.
All this said and done, people who have knowledge of physics
will tell you that two magnets with the same polarity will repel each other initially
but when they come close enough, the stronger magnet will change the orientation
of the magnetic domains of the weaker magnet and you will all of a sudden find
that they are attracting each other. In the same way, if only we allow
ourselves to alter our orientation (p.s : not the sexual one) and peel off the
layers of ego and self-doubt we will in fact be able to peer into our ‘inner’ self
and find inner peace.
In short, we need to let go and let ourselves be pulled towards
inner peace than fight it. It is like diving from a plane 15,000 feet above the
ground and letting gravity do the rest, except in the case of skydiving we better
use a parachute, without which we will most definitely end up in pieces and
find eternal peace. Well, let us stick to the metaphor for now!
