El límite del alma y el trabajo del alma

By Luis Miguel Gallardo Founder & President, World Happiness Foundation Professor of Practice, Shoolini University – Yogananda School of Spirituality and Happiness

I feel limited.

Let me say that again, because it is not something I am supposed to say. I lead an organization dedicated to the happiness of ten billion people. I write about consciousness, about freedom, about the triad of Fundamental Peace. I have studied with masters, traveled to temples, sat in silence in the Himalayas, built frameworks and summits and academic chairs. And right now, watching the world burn — watching children die under rubble, watching nations choose domination over dialogue, watching the machinery of violence operate with casual efficiency — I feel the limit of what one human being can do.

This is not despair. It is honesty. And honesty, I have learned, is where the real work begins.

What We Are Witnessing

We are living through a period of extraordinary and simultaneous violence. Wars rage across continents. Bombs fall on schools and hospitals. Entire populations are displaced, dehumanized, erased from the moral imagination of those who claim to act in the name of freedom. The language of liberation is used to justify annihilation. The language of security is used to justify surveillance. The language of peace is used to justify silence.

Charles Eisenstein, whose moral clarity I admire, recently wrote about the principle that governs so much of our geopolitical reality: “Do whatever is in your interests as long as you can get away with it.” He is right. This is the operating code — not only of empires and armies, but of trafficking networks, extractive economies, and every system that treats human beings as instruments rather than as ends in themselves. It is the principle of total domination. And it is killing us. Not only those beneath the bombs. All of us. Because — and this is the truth I keep returning to — we are not separate. What we do to the other, we do in some form to ourselves.

Eisenstein names this with precision: civil violence mirrors foreign violence; depression mirrors oppression; the deadening of inner life mirrors the extinguishing of life outside. Those who go numb in order to commit the evil deeds of war must live numb. They cannot escape the suffering they inflict.

I agree. And I want to go further.

The Soul Level

In my work — in my writing from Vietnam, from Kolkata, from the Himalayas, from Jaipur — I have been tracing what I call Fundamental Peace: not as a policy goal, not as a slogan, but as a lived foundation. Peace as freedom, consciousness, and happiness woven together. Peace not as the absence of conflict but as the presence of something deeper — an alignment between the inner life and the outer truth.

But here is what I must confess: I have come to believe that the level at which most of us are operating — even those of us

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