Inner peace (Part 1)

Inner peace is a universal need. There is no one on this earth who does not aspire to inner peace. It is not a modern phenomenon; this peace, everyone has aspired through the ages, regardless of its color, beliefs, religion, race, nationality, age, sex, wealth or technological advancement of its people.

People have taken various paths to find inner peace: some thought they found it in money, in drugs, in music or meditation, while others looked for it in their own half, in their professional career or through their children, etc.

Yet, in the majority of people, this quest is perpetual. Nowadays, we have been led to believe that technological advancement and modernization can bring us physical comfort through which inner peace is possible.

However, if we consider the most industrialized and advanced nation in the world, from the technological point of view (the United States), this reasoning does not hold water. Statistics show that in the United States, nearly 20 million adults suffer from depression each year. And what is depression, if not a total absence of inner peace?

Moreover, in the year 2000, the number of people killed by suicide in that country was twice as high as the number of people who died of AIDS. But the media being what they are, we hear more about deaths from AIDS than people who commit suicide. On the other hand, more people die by suicide than by homicide in the United States, which has a very high homicide rate.

So technological advancement and modernization have brought neither serenity nor inner peace. On the contrary, despite the comfort brought by modernization, we are even further away from this peace than our ancestors were.