24 April 2015 - QA 3

The feeling of ego leads us to dominate others, or be disrespectful. What is the message of The Art of Living that would help bring us together, and be more respectful of each other?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:

One of the biggest crisis on the planet is the identity crisis. We identify ourselves as somebody, and those who do not belong to the same identity, we think that they are against us and we become afraid of them, or we want to dominate them and so we show aggression towards them.
So what we need to change is: our identity.

There are several layers of identity:
1. We are part of one divinity
2. We are one humanity
3. Then comes male or female
4. The religion we belong to
5. The country we belong to
When these identity reverses, we forget the basic identity, i.e., we are all human beings.

Those who we feel do not belong to us, we are not happy with them. We want to dominate them. The tendency to dominate is because of the ego, and the antidote for this is having a sense of belongingness to everybody.

For me, wherever I go, I feel totally at home. Not once have I felt that I am in a foreign land. I have traveled from North Pole to South Pole, everywhere I feel absolutely at home. We can cultivate this feeling within us, we just need to see life from a broader perspective.

We must remember these three Cs:
1. Context
2. Commitment
3. Compassion
See life from a bigger context. What is ego? You think you have achieved something? What are you? Who are you? You are nothing! You are not even a speck in this creation! Billions of years have passed, and billions will come in the future, in this great span of time we are nowhere! So when we give a bigger context to life, the ego simply starts dissolving or just smiles – it is not an angry ego, but a smiling ego.
Then commitment; when life has commitment towards human values such as compassion and nonviolence, then life flows in a proper direction.
Then compassion, which is a natural thing. We all have compassion. In fact I would say there is not one person who does not have compassion on the planet; in some it is only not expressed, it is covered and needs uncovering.