Peace is a positive process.
Its inner import is infinitely richer than mere war-less-ness
Just as we have been waging wars since the dawn of history now we must learn to wage peace.
Splengler, after the First World War, and Toynbee, after the second, have convincingly shown us through their monumental study of world cultures that western civilization has become increasingly decadent and has neared its complete collapse.
The Sun has certainly risen up in the East and India is evidently in the lead. This, however, is a Call for greater responsibility and not just a point of pride.
I do not subscribe to the view that Civilization is divisible, either racially or hemispheric ally. For Civilization itself there are no Eastern and Western, Northern and Southern quarters, and directions.
Civilization is one and indivisible.
If western civilization has neared a collapse, the eastern, too, has certainly shared in its decaying process.
We cannot afford to forget the fact that Man is Indivisible, and, therefore, his civilization could not be otherwise.
In this shrunken world of today, we must learn to overcome the sense of all l imitative frontiers, cultural, national and geographical.
Civilization tends to decay and collapse when they become separative and exclusive, imperialistic and arrogant.
War is a lengthened shadow of the inner conflicts of Man.
Peace is a removal of inner conflicts. It, however, does not mean that Peace is a total blank.
True Peace is a vibrant, dynamic state of self conscious. Being-Becoming, at once creative, meditative and activist.
We have strayed away from the path of a Peace since the advent of the vast-scale industrialization.
Man is thinned out into an empty nothing; today he is merely existing as a screw in the mighty machine of his own creation, and of his own total destruction. His self-identity has ceased to exist as a significant and operative force.
Thermonuclear weapons are the inevitable end result of our lunatic search for power of destruction - power and yet more power to scrape out our neighboring nations. What a monstrous travesty of Jeaus's teaching - Love thy neighbor?
Incalculable power from the heart of atom - but power for what? To extinguish the whole human family?
Freedom from slavery and subordination - but freedom for what? freedom for spiritual decay, moral degradation, and physical self destruction.
Today, our paranoiac tendencies could be unmistakably identified and ascertained.
We seem to be working out the compulsions necessitated by some strange suicide complex, latent in the unconscious of the Homo sapient.
Our minds need to be completely re-orientated.
Our thinking has to be re-conditioned.
Before we learn to do anything better we must learn to think better.
What Albert Schweitzer names as 'elemental thinking' is the science and art, to be cultivated by each one, and all of us. The content of elemental thinking is four fold.
Man's relation to the universe, the meaning of life, the nature of goodness and a feeling of Reverence for life.
Albert Schweitzer is one of the world's greatest living men of today. Indeed, he may be the greatest, according to quite a few thinkers and observers, in the west.
He has denied himself the dazzling glories of several careers as a philosopher, as an organist as a theologian, as a musicologist, as an author.
In my brief interview with him at Bonn in Germany when he was there on a Lecture - Music tour, he gave a message for we and for all to whom I may happen to carry it - ''Watch your thoughts. Let them be the nearest to life itself. Modern science have abstracted themselves from life but they will return to it, eventually.''
Another Immorted, Albert Einstein emphasized the same idea in a different key. He told me at his home in Princeton in March to 1953, ''To change our minds, we must contact righty type, higher type of minds and they are so very, very few contact alone can improve the quality of our mind. Right kind of books, could also change our thoughts. Your problem of world peace is indeed the problem of different kind of books, could also change our thoughts. Your problem of world peace is indeed the problem of different kind of thinking. I had to leave the League of Nations. I could not find any sincerity; either.''
The concept of Viveka, in India Philosophy, as the major key to the Sadhana of self-realization, brings out in relief why thinking is such an essential activity in re-conditioning human life for higher attainments.
Viveka is discrimination, detecting the true from the false, the substance from the shadow.
''The principle of soul alone transcends the temporal process and therefore it is truly eternal. Everything other than the soul, the whoe visible world of objects, is therefore, evanscent and untrue. To realize this truth with absolute certainly is the nature and function of Viveka.''
Shankaracharya has explained the concept of Viveka in this lucid manner, in his magnificient treatise on ''Direct Experience or the Absoulte' अपरोक्ष अनुभूति.
The Elemental thinking, the Viveka, is a feature and function of the whole of man's being and personality. The cerebral movement alone is not enough, we must learn - to think with our blood and bones.
Integral thinking could be possible if only our body and being are cleansed of all the gross elements. When we are simple and pure we can think right and straight; we can discriminate. Viveka will start its activity and establish us in Peace and poise.
Body is the base of our being of which the crest is the thinking activity purify the base and the crest will shine in radiant purity.
And what is body but Food transformed into organic substance. Pure food will give us a pure body and pure body will be the right conditioning for Viveka or elemental thinking.
The root of the whole matter is correct food.
The great Sant - Kumar a philosopher of the chhandogya has both stated and solved the whole problem in just two words - आहारशुद्धौ सत्वशुद्धी:
। 'Purity of food will spell the purity of soul.''
To achieve world peace we must purify our minds and thoughts and to do this, purer foods are a basic necessity.
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Dr. A.K. Bhagwat realized the truth of this Logic of world peace, thirty-five years ago.
He dedicated himself to the cause of better food for better thinking, the moment he perceived the sequences between food and peace. He has vigorously participated in the freedom struggle of India. He has bee a steady follower of Mahatama Gandhi whose faith in food as a thought conditioner is universally known.
For the last twenty-five years I have seen and known Dr. Bhagwat always absorbed in food research Mahatmaji had placed him in charge of the Nature Cure Center at Uruli Kanchan, a village near Poona for this very purpose.
In the first world war he worked as a medical assistant in the Indian army and had occasions to travel abroad.
He is a valiant soldier of the spirit. He has chosen to worship God, in the name and form of the Indian villager. Like Gandhiji, Dr. Bhagwat lives as a villager.
On 22nd July, 1956 the Guru-Paurnima Day, a day on which, all over India spiritual aspirants offer annual homage and worship to their Guru Dr. Bhagwat is re-dedicating himself to the cause of world peace through purer food.
His devotion to Mahatma Gandhi and to Vinoba Bhave has been his mighty asset. He has been working in tune with their teaching and his success has really been remarkable.
His main emphasis on what he calls ''efficient economy'' an economy which secures and material. He has formulated a theory of social evolution is terms of a great Vedic Hymn called Purusha-Sookta. He deplores waste, in every form and names our civilization of growing standards, as a world-wide waste-paper basket.
Let us all join our hands with Dr. Bhagwat, a most devoted servant of God in the form of Man.
- D. G. Vinod
ॐ ॐ ॐ
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Name of the book: World Peace through correct diet
Author: Dr. A.K. Bhagwat
Preface: Nyayaratna D. G. Vinod
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