7th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE AT SMS VARANASI
In a world beleaguered by furor fashioned out of the extremes of faith-driven beliefs and emotions, finding the center of one’s being has never been more crucial for sustaining individual and societal harmony. As the Sufi mystic Rumi preached once, “You’re not just a drop in the ocean, you’re also the mighty ocean in the drop”, a deeper connection with one’s own mind and spirit leading to a spiritual harmony between thoughts, emotions, actions and the ability to extend this harmony to the community seems to be the only rational way to handle the Herculean task of addressing mammoth problems of social injustice, ecological devastation, extreme economic disparities, destructive conflicts and terrorism plaguing the planet at the moment. This spiritual harmony is also a potential source of happiness as sermonized by Manu (4.160): ‘All that which is in the control of external objects is unhappiness while that which is in the control of one’s mind is happiness. This is the concise feature of happiness and unhappiness.’ Since the publication of first World Happiness Report the year 2012 in support of the UN High-Level Meeting on happiness and well-being, there have been remarkable shifts in ideologies and definitions of growth and prosperity across the globe. Most of the modern world economies consider happiness as an opposite measure of social progress and therefore, have been recognizing it as one of the foremost goals of public policy whereas building and sustaining societal harmony remains a challenge capable of rousing remarkable shifts in terms of both peace and power before nations of developed and developing world alike.