CHENNAI: Looking at the situation of world that we live in today, one factor that can be considered the biggest cause for our downfall from an exalted stage of a divine being, is violence in all its forms. Yes, it is violence that makes hell of heaven. In other words, paradise is lost when violence, in the form of five vices and their offshoots, enters the human mind.
In heaven, all humans are divine because they are totally pure, which means there is absence of violence of all types i.e physical, verbal and mental. In addition, everyone in that period is soul-conscious, that is they are naturally conscious of the fact that they are souls and not bodies. Because of this the intrinsic qualities of the soul, which include love, happiness and knowledge, manifest themselves in all human actions.
This means that no one causes harm to anyone in heaven and there is no dishonesty, greed, deceit, anger, selfishness or negativity of any other kind. Since everyone remains healthy, happy and prosperous, the feeling of discontent does not exist, nor do any wants.
Now, to see if all this is true, we only need to observe our state of mind when we have behaved badly with someone. This would make us realise that our behaviour was dictated by anger, ego, jealousy, hatred or some other vice.
So, in short all these vices cause pain to the self and make us inflict pain on others. Such violence is a violation of divinity and it drags us down from a divine status to that of an ordinary human being.
After all, what is the difference between the deities and humans? The former are always full of virtues and totally free of vices whereas humans have virtues in varying degree and are prone to come under the influence of vices.
So rare has virtue become today that if someone remains steadfast in even one virtue — say honesty — he stands out among his peers and is half-jokingly called a saint or a deity.
Remember. Divinity cannot stay where there is violence, light and darkness, nectar and poison, divine and devilish traits cannot co-exist. So if we really want to bring peace to this world, we have to first root out the vices from our minds.