The way people seek happiness today is detrimental to peace. Under the influence of consumerism, modernized people seek sensual pleasures for happiness. In this way, they have made their happiness more dependent on external material gains. Instead of achieving happiness, they find themselves farther away from it. As their happiness become transient, these insatiable beings chase happiness and never find it. While more material pleasures are needed to kindle this transient happiness, it is natural that these people have been brought into more mutual conflicts and that natural resources have been exploited beyond the capacity of the earth’s life-support system. In this way, unsustainable development results and world peace could never be realized.
This is why right development and right education are needed. In the right process, we accept the fact that the basic minimum peace, even the inner one of the mind, is based on the fundamental freedom of being free from poverty and from life-threatening conditions. Average people need a number of external material pleasures for their happiness. By right education, their happiness becomes more independent of external material pleasures. They become materially easier and easier satiable. The more they are educated, the less material goods are needed to make them happy. At the same time, as they become materially more productive and less is needed to satisfy their material desire, they have larger surpluses of material goods for supplies to help their fellow beings, to further social well-being and to support cultural, moral, intellectual and spiritual advancement of the humanity.
In this system, the truth of relativity and interdependency is applied. Here we see the relative and interdependent relationship between human development and freedom, and that between material prosperity and spiritual accomplishment. One point of significance is that economic success is treated here as a means, not the goal. The more one is educated, the more one’s happiness is independent of material pleasures. And the more one is developed, the more material surpluses society will have to sustain global well-being and the noble progress of humanity.
Described above is the way to bring lasting peace to the world. Without a doubt, religious and spiritual institutions have important parts to play to achieve this goal.