Through my eyes

"Peace in the world depends on peace within. If we have that we can approach problems in a spirit of compassion, dialogue and respect for the rights of others - always a better solution than resorting to the use of weapons and force. External disarmament depends on inner disarmament." Dalai Lama

Two cities. Twelve and a half hours. Twenty-nine dead. In El Paso, a gunman opened fire at a crowded Walmart on Saturday, killing 20 and injuring 26. Within hours, authorities had tentatively linked him to a manifesto that railed against an "invasion" of Latino migrants. The bodies still lay in the aisles in El Paso when, more than 1,500 miles away in Dayton, Ohio, another gunman opened fire on a crowd, killing nine and injuring 27.

The world as we know it is in turmoil. People are suffering because they are in pain. The pain which stems from so many issues, like loneliness, lack of direction and our total detachment from God.

On average, 57peoplearemurdered in South Africa every day and we all live in fear of some. Apparently humans are genetically predisposed to kill each other. The rate of lethal violence is 7 times higher than the average for all mammals.

Human bloodlust - from war to murder - traces back millions of years to our primate ancestors. That's the conclusion of a controversial new study, which reaches far back into our family tree to uncoverthe evolutionary roots of lethal violence among more than 1000 mammalian species.

So why are we killing each other and why all the mass murders in America? Why 43 people murdered in Cape Town two weeks ago in just one weekend? Why?

Could it be that the greater the emotional and mental energy spent fighting the pain, the more we suffer and that we are all suppressing some invisible energy which is turning us into monsters.

It is true that humans have a marvellous ability for cognitive processing. Humans survive by quality and quantity. Let us take several facts that human is concerned about in their day to day lives. We know that we kill 55 billion domesticated animals for food per year. If we killed humans at that rate, it would take us about 50 days to wipe out the human race.

As a race, humans are one mistake away from extinction. One could argue, however, that since humans "won" the game of evolution, we can benefit from our dominance on the whole world, including other animals. Of course, this does not help our existence, in fact, by killing other animals we kill ourselves. At the same time, our extinction would benefit all other species of this planet, and it would probably be for the best that we do go extinct. Humans are, in many ways, the cancer of this world. We have a selfish and egotistical outlook on the world, which cannot be fixed.

And maybe this is why we have resorted to the ultimate act - murder We will never know so maybe we should stop grasping and accept life for what it is, the ever changing cycle of life and death and maybe when we commit to seeing ourselves as part of a cosmic whole, good and bad, then we may come closer to peace.