Peace on Earth: Way of Peace: Love As Antidote to War

By Deepak Chopra

More than 50 years ago, Mahatma Gandhi offered a startling truth: "There is no way to peace. Peace is the way." To a country bogged down in the morass of war, this could be a beacon of hope.

The history of peace movements in the USA has been divisive and bitter. Thirty years after the Vietnam peace movement sputtered out, it is still considered political suicide for a presidential candidate to actually promote peace.

Senator Kerry, who has an anti-war background, is desperately trying to disguise that fact. President Bush, who has a background of shirking war, is just as desperately trying to cloak that fact by being a hawk... Both candidates have failed to offer peace as an option, since they agree on a central tenet, that war is the way to peace (if not this particular war against Iraq, then a general war on terrorism).

Such a viewpoint, if carried out, can only lead to more violence. Gandhi was correct when he pointed out that lasting peace is achieved only when a nation realises that peace is the way, in and of itself.

But what would that way be? The way of peace can only succeed by providing substitutes for all the satisfactions that war brings. Officially we deplore war as a nation, but beneath the surface it is clear that war is satisfying.

First of all, war is a habit that we are comfortable with. Like any other habit, we can reach for it the way a chain-smoker reaches for a cigarette, even while muttering that we have to quit.

In Mira Nair's film adaptation of Vanity Fair, a woman comments smugly at a party, "War is good for men. It's like turning over the soil." So war, it seems, provides an outlet for male aggression...

It may be too late, but could one of these candidates, presumably Kerry, begin to hold out the satisfactions of peace? These were real enough before 9/11, although we took them for granted. In peace one breathes easily. There is space to allow for bonding and connections with other people. Arguments proceed with mutual respect for either side.

Gandhi went further to show that the way of peace ends suffering and oppression, not by warring against an enemy but by bearing witness to wrongs and allowing sympathy and common humanity to do their patient work. Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa lived different aspects of peace, which was proven to be a viable way to achieve great things.

When an individual is exposed to the way of peace, reality changes down to the very cells in the body. An experimenter who showed random subjects a movie of Mother Teresa found that their immune systems responded immediately. The rise of an immunoglobulin called IGA proved that exposure to love actually increased the body's defences. This happened regardless of whether the subjects approved of Mother Teresa or not.

It's time to be honest with ourselves. We have not given the way of peace a fair chance. The way of peace requires a genuine commitment to everything that is the opposite of war. Gandhi's most cherished value was ahimsa, which isn't simply non-violence.

Ahimsa is reverence for life and a vision of human beings put here on this earth to explore their spiritual birthright, excluding no one, making no one your enemy. The way of peace can lead to nobility of soul. The way of war, as we are learning with sinking hearts, can only lead to the grim degradation of our most cherished values.

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See also: Peace of Mind, Peace on Earth, Life and Beyond, Love and Happiness, Body Mind and Soul)