Inter-Community Harmony: Relevance of a Universal Law

By Roshel

A major challenge facing humanity today is the prevalence of negative stereotypes about different communities and their members. In our closely interconnected world, such prejudices are a major challenge to harmonious inter-community relations and hence to world peace.

Different approaches have been tried to solve the problem of such prejudice. It must be recognised at the very outset that overcoming widespread inter-communal prejudice requires a transformation of attitudes and behaviour on the part of individuals, and that it cannot be solved merely through preaching, and certainly not by complaining. Here, it is important to be conscious of a certain universal law—that what one gives out, one gets back. One reaps what one sows. Applied to inter-community relations, this law reveals that if members of a certain community would like members of another community to have a good image of them and to relate with them with harmony and goodwill, they must themselves have good feelings for the latter. If they develop an appreciation of the good aspects of the other community, including of its culture and traditions, it is likely that members of this other community will also begin to appreciate the goodness in the first community and its culture and traditions. And when this happens, members of both communities will likely grow closer to each other and that their prejudices will dissolve to an appreciable extent.

This world is like a mirror. What one ‘receives’ when one peers into a mirror is what one ‘puts into’ it. If you smile, the mirror smiles back at you, as it were. If you frown, you see a grumpy face frowning back at you. This rule applies to individuals as well as to communities. If members of a community have good feelings and genuine well-wishing for members of another community, this is precisely what it will get in return from the latter. If they send out kindness and goodwill to others, the same will come back to them. This is a universal spiritual law. Acting according to this law is possibly the only effective way for members of diverse communities to live in harmony with each other, with their relations characterised by genuine goodwill.