FT Chronicle

MANILA, Philippines– Worrying of 2012? Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, international humanitarian leader, does not, as he says to the audience at the SMX convention center, “We are going to see 2013, as good as 2012.”

The fear of the year 2012 is caused by series of cataclysmic changes in the earth adding the forecast of Nostradamus and the Mayans and the upcoming disaster movie “2012”.

But Sri Sri (means His Holiness which his students affectionately call him), the spiritual chief of the UN-associated The Art of Living Foundation, provided this guarantee not as a seer but as a social advocate that 2012 is not a doomsday picture but a new dawn in humanity’s consciousness.

“During this time, the planet and its inhabitants may undergo a positive physical or spiritual transformation, and 2012 may mark the beginning of a new era,” said the white-robed Indian teacher.

“We are going to see a new consciousness developing, that of humanism,” he told a small media group that he met before his public talk.

“Remember 1999, featuring the famous Nostradamus prediction? The second millennium came and the world is still existing.”

“Remember the fall of communism? It took another 20 years to bring capitalism to collapse.”

“Today, we live in a culture of caution and uncertainty of the times where banks can no longer be trusted. We live in a time when one’s savings and livelihood can be wiped out overnight,” he said.

He pleaded people to look for inner peace in the middle of a changing world, “to develop new attitudes and new ways of coping with the difficulties and hardships we are facing such as disasters, typhoons and flooding.”

News from Inquirer.net