While here, he also attended the signing ceremony of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between The Prem Rawat Foundation (TPRF) and the Scouts Association Malaysia.
The MoU is aimed at offering the foundation’s Peace Education Programme (PEP) to local youths, starting with scout communities in schools across the nation.
Known worldwide for his advocacy of peace in the last five decades, Prem Rawat also met with members of the local media to talk about humankind’s quest for inner peace.
In an interview with former editor-in-chief Yong Soo Heong of Malaysia’s national news agency Bernama, Prem said peace could be humankind’s greatest achievement but only if people were able to discover their own sense of peace from within first.
“We have an incredible opportunity because we are alive. We can create tall buildings; we can create highways; we can create bridges; we can create all these, the technologies…but there is one more thing that we can achieve. And that is peace for every single human being — not collectively, but for every individual,” he said.
He said that many attempts at engineering social peace had come to naught simply because peace exists within the individual, and not externally.
“You have to learn how to look towards ‘you’. And a simple way to just do that is to stop being distracted by everything else,” Prem said, adding that being at peace with oneself also contributed to mental strength and wellbeing.
“It’s like a muscle. If that ‘peace muscle’ has not been exercised, that ‘peace gene’ has not been allowed to completely manifest itself.”
He said people have been fighting for ages simply because they have not turned their attention within “towards the quest for inner peace”.
Asked how people could arrest the decline in their finer values due to the distractions of the fast-paced world they lived in today, Prem responded: “We have to examine what is valuable to us. Is personal peace valuable to us or not? Nobody talks about peace as they talk about success, promotion, making more money.”
He said it was time people paid more attention to human potential, adding that this was connected with gratitude, self-fulfilment, feeling alive and feeling good about oneself.
Prem also spoke at length about the concepts of life and death, describing these as “two walls” forced apart by “the breath”. “If you don’t breathe, you would be gone… And you keep going, and that breath keeps pushing those two walls apart.
“And this is basically, not the sum of your accomplishments, but the sum of your existence. And you are alive. And that, to you, should mean everything. You have won the biggest lottery. Take into account this phenomenon called ‘life’,” he said.