Contents
Prem Rawat: “You don’t have to go to a monastery to find peace”
Interview
The lecturer and writer visits Spain to present his new book «Listen to yourself», in which he pursues the search for peace in the midst of a noisy world
Prem Rawat (India, 1957) has dedicated his life to Peace, with a capital letter. The emphaticness of this statement can be almost overwhelming, but this writer and lecturer, who from the age of eight transmits a clear and forceful message, has dedicated his entire career to finding peace in a place that many times we do not think to look at: our interior. .
It was his father who he got this idea from. He, who told his message to everyone who wanted to listen, had as its essence that the peace that we spend our lives looking for is not waiting for us lost, but already is within us. In the wake of his father’s death, Rawat saw clearly that his life purpose was to continue his father’s legacy, and he continues with it.
At just 13 years old, he spoke about the power of knowing ourselves on the main stage of the now-well-known Glastonbury Music Festival. It was at that age the first time he landed in the United States, with the anticipation of being there for a few months, but he never returned. Since then he has dedicated his entire career to travel around the world telling the virtues of peace. And it is that Prem Rawat is clear that “finding this is what we need to be happy, to be able to live in harmony and survive in our current society”, an environment of dizzying pace that weighs us down and even gives us a moment of truce to discover who we really are.
Now, the “peace ambassador” publishes “Listen to yourself” (Aguilar), a title in which he investigates the capacity we must develop to look within ourselves. We met him in the middle of his tour to promote the book in Spain, with which he seeks to “help us understand each other” and thus learn to coexist in our current society, “full of noise that does not let us hear each other.”
What makes it more difficult for us to hear ourselves, the noise from the outside, or the noise we have inside?
Everything makes it difficult for us, but the worst is when we take the noise from outside and turn it into internal noise. This makes it much more difficult to listen to us, and in the end that is the most important thing: to listen to us.
Does everyone have peace inside?
Yes, we all have peace within ourselves, it has always been there. Socrates said “Know thyself”, and he said it because there is something that we have to look for and it is inside. It is incredible, but peace is within and we must seek it.
Even people with internal conflicts, people who generally do not do good deeds …?
Look, we developed a program called “Peace Education Program” and we do it in prisons and penitentiaries, where we see people who are going to be confined for the rest of their lives. However, when I talk to them they discover that there is peace within them too, that they can move on.
And where should we start looking for that peace?
For us. We spend our lives looking for peace outside, we look in books, in the mountains, in temples, even in other people … However, when we focus on ourselves, when we pick up a mirror and look inside, we are taking the first step to search peace.
To live fully, must we accept death?
What you have to accept is life. There are two walls, the first is birth and the other is our death. The important thing is not to worry about death or try to find the date when we are going to die, but to focus on life, feel this moment in our life and focus on it, because our time is limited. Thus, accepting life, we arrive at calm and happiness.
Aren’t we grateful to be alive enough?
Do not! And that’s why I fall back on the idea so much in this book, it’s essential to have gratitude for everything we have in our lives.
So how can we learn to be grateful for this life?
I come back to it, but we have to open ourselves up. We already do it with others: when a friend is in trouble, we tell him not to worry, we give him our advice. But when we are in that situation, what do we say to ourselves? “This is horrible … you are terrible”, and if we told this to a friend or friend it would not have good results. We must accept ourselves, because this is difficult for many people.
To get to know ourselves… must we separate ourselves from the world around us?
There are people who think this way, but it is not necessary to separate from the world, and in fact it is not possible. Everything takes place on this plane in which we live: we have to work, we have to eat … we are social beings and we need this world. However, what we have to do is seek peace within all this. It is not necessary to go to a monastery or be a monk, we simply have to seek the peace that we have within.
Is caution in life necessary or can it end up weighing us down?
Opportunity is offered to us all the time, with each of our breaths, but we are not paying attention. We get up in the morning, we start reading the newspaper and we see the headlines and in none of them do we read the really most important headline, and that is that we are alive now. It is important to accept this headline because now we are alive and now we have this opportunity.
He talks a lot about the noise of the world… How should our relationship with technology be?
Right now what happens is that we are not the ones who manage the technology, but that technology drives us, it overwhelms us. As human beings, it is important that we now focus on finding the meaning of all this and we are the ones in charge of our lives, not letting Facebook or Twitter manage us. This is the only way in which we are going to win, because now these applications manage to mark the agenda of our life.
There is a subtitle in the book that says «Learn to feel», How do we do it?
When you are not free, you are not the owner of your life, you are not capable of feeling anything. There are other people who tell you what to feel and how. If we are free, it is when we can and we begin to feel. Freedom is a word we all like, no matter what country you come from. And because? What are we slaves to? It is not obvious, but we are, we are slaves of our mind and it often does not allow us to advance.
There is a phrase in the book that says: “We cannot live in yesterday, we cannot live in tomorrow.” Is the projection of the future necessary? How can we find a balance between living in the present and not losing sight of the future?
If we do not accept the future, and we do not accept the past, in the end we are in no man’s land. The only thing we are able to understand is the present. Be aware of what we do now, because when you are you become aware of now you create the past and you can predict the future in some way. If we dedicate ourselves to acting unconsciously, we make mistakes and these affect the past and have a reflection on the future. However, if we understand our present, this will be the one that defines us as human beings, nor will it define the future, nor will it define the past. What we do now is what is really important.