Conscience with love for peace

SOFIA STRIL-REVER shares her experience of the Mahotsav in Kanha Shanti Vanam at the United Nations, during International Day of Conscience with Love for Peace on April 5, 2024. Her call to action is to turn planet Earth into planet LOVE.

Heartfelt greetings dear friends,

Would you believe me if I tell you that I’m coming from another planet? As you know, our thoughts create our reality, therefore according to our different mindsets, we inhabit different worlds within a single world system. A couple of weeks ago I was invited by the Indian government to a gathering of spiritual leaders bringing together 75,000 participants, at the Heartfulness world headquarters near Hyderabad. There I landed on planet Love.

Every corner was bursting with positive energy, innovation, and creativity. I was surrounded by a community of visionaries and doers, shaping together the future. And the best part? Feeling inspired to reach higher with love in action.

Planet Love isn’t la la land. I have the good fortune of personally knowing global icons of love and they are the most realistic and pragmatic people. Why? Because they are connected to the primal, the vital reality of love that I experienced early in life, at 17, when I joined a modern saint, Sister Emmanuelle in her Cairo slum.

There I saw with my own eyes the power of love changing radically the lives of 40,000 people and turning their slum into a nice neighborhood with a new generation of girls becoming doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc. Imagine if we were all Sisters Emmanuelle here! Imagine if in these UN buildings, the thousands of experts and diplomats started their daily sessions with Gandhi’s talisman and a commitment to uplift the lives of the most vulnerable. The whole Earth would be planet Love.

We can make this happen. With conscience and love elevated at the level of global leadership, we can make a U-turn and shift from our civilization based on the ordering principle of short-term profit at the expense of the living, to a civilization based on the ordering principle of love and care.

Historically, the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 marks the rise of a global human conscience. Some have told me it’s a mistake to speak of the International Day of Conscience, and it should be the International Day of Consciousness, so it may be useful to recall the respective meanings of consciousness and conscience.

With conscience and love elevated 
at the level of global leadership, 
we can make a U-turn and shift from our civilization 
based on the ordering principle of short-term profit 
at the expense of the living, to a civilization 
based on the ordering principle of love and care.

Consciousness refers to the cognitive and reflexive processes at the root of language, concepts, symbols, and the ego. Conscience is mentioned in Article 1 of the 1948 Universal Declaration. It’s our innate sense of ethics that served as the foundation of human rights in the aftermath of World War II, in a world that had betrayed its conscience. But over 75 years later, the world keeps betraying its conscience. At the individual and the societal levels, the cause is a decentering of our conscience from its original caring nature, which modern psychology calls prosociality. As a result, conscience normalizes the atrocities of war, social and economic injustice.

Loveforce can be learned, and I guide people 
to experience it in the “Be the Love” protocol 
based on the traditional inner sciences of the mind and 
recent findings in social and affective neurosciences.

We could say that conscience and consciousness are the yang, the masculine energies of the mind, while love and compassion are the yin, the feminine energies of the mind. In our male-dominated societies, we are conditioned to develop a yang mindset that rationalizes increasing militarism and a criminal world economy benefiting hardly 20% of the human family, while wrecking the planet.

This International Day brings together Conscience and Love as foundational for Peace, so it was compelling for me to initiate with you its celebration. A few years ago, when mega fires circled the globe, making Earth a graveyard of countless animals and plants, I contemplated Gandhi’s words, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” It then dawned upon me that this radical change is love and I responded to him with, “Be the Love you wish to see in the world.”

Love is usually equated with individual feelings and emotions. But love is also a collective force for social justice and human evolution, as Martin Luther King Jr. promoted in his struggle for civil rights, under Gandhi’s inspiration. And MLK took up the Indian term Satyagraha, which he translated as “strength to love.” That I render as “Loveforce.”

Loveforce can be learned, and I guide people to experience it in the “Be the Love” protocol based on the traditional inner sciences of the mind and recent findings in social and affective neurosciences. With heart-focused meditation, we can significantly contribute to a culture of global collective care. As humans, we were born to channel the cosmic energies of life and transform life force into Loveforce. We were born to care for one another and all living beings on the Mother planet. To conclude, I invite us to make every day of our lives a day of Conscience with Love for Peace. And on future International Days of Conscience, let’s pass the torch from East to West, one time zone after the other, with celebrations and messages posted on giant screens from Australia to California. Together with our younger friends, let’s kickstart a global intergenerational movement to turn planet Earth into planet Love. Thank you.

Excerpts from a talk given at the UN offices two weeks after the Global Spirituality Mahotsav. International Day of Conscience with Love for Peace is held every year on April 5.

Illustrations by ANANYA PATEL