A perfectly sane looking man starts killing people from his hotel room!
A guy decides to drive erratically on busy city streets and kills a lot of people!
A suicide bomber decides to blow himself up at a sporting event, injuring hundreds and killing a few!
A man enters a school with a gun and starts shooting young children!
When anything of this sort happens, we waste no time talking about government’s inabilities, security flaws, incompetent laws and so on.
I am not saying laws and security measures are not important. They are absolutely essential. For e.g. if guns are banned, it will significantly minimize gun related crimes. If you don’t have access to a gun, you can’t fire it. Its no-brainer.
But can a competent government or strict laws completely eradicate these type of events happening?
I don’t think so. At best, they can minimize it.
The real problem is buried much deeper that we fail to address.
It is the inability of humans to pick the right thoughts to act on. It’s the inability of humans to pause and look at their thoughts from a distance. When a person completely believes the narrative of the mind and eventually acts on it, disasters happen. When human mind loses its ability to differentiate between right and wrong; result is a catastrophe. No security camera can capture what’s going inside a human mind! That’s where it all begins. Police can’t be everywhere! Cameras cant occupy each and every corner of the planet! There will always be people with no fear of laws, no matter how strict they are.
All wars begin in human mind.
How can a government stop a person sitting in a restaurant who decides to start stabbing people with a kitchen fork?!
How easy is to google how to make explosives at home?!
Which security camera can stop a person who decides to blow himself in a busy shopping centre?!
None.
It is an unrealistic expectation to think that these events won’t happen again.
The change we are looking for is not from collective to individual but individual to collective. The change on a collective level doesn’t necessarily change each individual however, the change in an individual will always have an effect on collective. When we humans will learn to master the mind rather being slave of it, world will be a better place.
As we approach the new year, lets change the language. Lets pray for a peaceful new year than a happy one. If we achieve peace, happiness follows. It is a byproduct.
Let’s hope people take responsibility for their own thoughts and actions.
Let’s hope people put as much effort in training their minds as much their bodies.
Let’s hope we can use our minds as merely a tool rather being completely hypnotized by it.
Let’s train our minds for compassion than hate.
Let’s train our minds for gratefulness than greed.
Let’s train our minds for kindness than hostility.
May we have a peaceful 2018.
