SATURDAY MARCH 3, 2012

9:30 AM — 12:30 PM

ST. JOHN’S EPISCOPAL CHURCH 40 Fifth Street, Petaluma

In this half-day seminar we will explore critical insights on Jesus’ nonviolence with special attention to His practical relevance today.

Topcis incude the historical Jesus and the way of nonviolence, the meaning of sacrifice, forgiveness & atonement, selfless work, Christian spirituality and loving your enemy.

SPONSORS OF THIS EVENT

The Metta Center for Nonviolence

www.mettacenter.org

St. John’s Episcopal Church

www.saintjohnsepiscopalpetaluma.org

Suggested event donation: $10-$20 at the door. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. For more information contact Stephanie at 707-774-6299

Our primary aim at METTA is to explore this massive shift in cultural values, and help initiate a disarmament so thorough that it proceeds to the very attitudes and behaviors that call war into existence. We look first of all to Gandhi, who saw the individual as the primary instrument of historical change. In particular, we look to that same unanswerable power which Gandhi discovered in himself and roused in his 300 million countrymen, the power he called Satyagraha, “soul force.”  Primarily a spiritual force, it represents a commitment to draw upon what is best and most enduring in humankind, and to begin by developing it in oneself. Gandhi’s life and work persuade us that this force can help reform some of the most pervasive forms of violence–economic, social and political–that characterize our way of life.  Read the rest here.

We focus on the “long run” and look beyond traditional levers of political change (the policy makers, the mass outcry) to those local, self-reliant reform efforts–in neighborhoods, on the farms, in the schools, cities, towns, and countrysides–where people of all persuasions are working towards peace in the world at large, by reshaping the world at hand. It is a kind of “trickle up” approach. When millions of individuals become grounded in nonviolence, simplicity and self-reliance, Gandhi argued, our institutions will begin to mirror those values, just ast they now reflect the conscious and unconscious drives of our “imperial” culture. METTA begins then with the unexamined potential of the person, but we by no means end there. We would help others explore the conversion of violence within themselves and their communities to form a new basis for conducting the relationships of school, marketplace, family and society.

Our primary method is education, formal and informal, for it offers the means to challenge the assumptions of the old paradigm while it provides the tools to discover and create alternatives.

To read how this work has affected the lives of individuals around the world, click here. 

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Building the World We Want from metta center on Vimeo.

An interactive webinar about Gandhian constructive programme, spiritual activism and nonviolence. Begins with a short description of the work of Metta.

Q and A follows webinar. Please contact us: info@mettacenter.org with questions or suggestions.

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Please join us this Friday, January 27^th, for a special evening with renowned Nepalese Human Rights Defender Jit Man Basnet.

A human rights lawyer and journalist who has been working in human rights and transitional justice for 12 years in Nepal, Mr. Basnet was kidnapped and tortured by Maoist rebels in 2002, and then was illegally arrested by the Royal Nepal Army in 2004 and tortured while in secret custody for 258 days. He was instrumental in the release of 29 disappeared civilians despite threats from the army for being witness to army atrocity, torture, disappearances and killings. He has written a powerful book on his experience called 258 Dark Days.

Mr. Basnet has offered to spend an evening with friends of peace in San Francisco to share a bit of his story, discuss the political situation in Nepal, and engage in conversation about approaches to protecting human rights in times of crisis and upheaval.

He is a delightful, gracious individual whose acquaintance you will be very pleased to have made!

When: Friday, January 27, 7:00 – 9:00 pm

Where: 170 Capp St., Suite C, San Francisco (Offices of LFA Group: Learning for Action)

About the venue: 16^th and Mission BART stop is 1 block away; upon exiting the BART station, walk east on 16^th St. and take your first right onto Capp Street. 170 Capp Street is 2/3 of the way down the block on your right. Please be advised that there is a shelter on this block of Capp St. so there may be homeless people loitering about.

Wine and snacks will be served.

Please RSVP to hildy.alex@gmail.com

(please note, this event is not sponsored by METTA)

meditation for peacemakers

Date: March 17, 2012

Location:  Petaluma, CA
Conducted by:   Metta Center for Nonviolence
Course Instructors: Michael Nagler, Metta Center President and Professor emeritus and founder of Peace and Conflict Studies Program, UC Berkeley; Stephanie Van Hook, Metta Center Executive Director
Course fees: $125 general (We do not want to turn anyone away for lack of funds.  We invite those who can do so to offer more than the suggested fee so that others can attend for less.)

This special, 1-day workshop will provide an in-depth introduction to passage meditation and its applications to nonviolence and peacemaking. Participants will learn how to meditate along these lines (if they do not have another practice already), experience group practice, and explore the relationship between inner and outer peace. Participants will also be encouraged to discover their particular gifts as makers of peace, and create a strategy for expressing those gifts, as well as learning practical strategies for maintaining their enthusiasm in the face of stress and resistance.

Click here to register

Learning Goals

(1) Students will establish an effective meditation practice, and explore effective contexts for its application in peacework and activism. (2) Students will deepen their understanding of nonviolence as an inner and outer resource. (3) Students will gain insight into the nature of conflict and its creative resolution.

Core Knowledge

Positive peace, nonviolence, inner security, an understanding of spiritual growth and its applications to social change.

Core Skills

meditation, detachment, conflict analysis and resolution

 Ours is not an empty, disorderly world, but an exquisitely structured web whose design embraces and affects all living things.

–Sally Goerner

WESTERN CIVILIZATION could be considered a grand experiment, culminating in the three-plus centuries of the industrial revolution, to see if the universe could be accounted for without resorting to the concept of a Supreme Being or an overall purpose.  The experiment was a huge success.  It proved without a doubt that the universe can not be accounted for without introducing the concept of purpose; life could not have come about by chance — as Ervin Lazlo puts it, “pure chance…does not appear to be a significant factor in the evolution of life;” the human being cannot be described as a separate, finite, physical fragment doomed to compete for diminishing resources, but a (potentially) conscious actor in the fulfillment of the design that biologist Sally Goerner alludes to above.

If the physical universe were not governed by laws, science would not be possible; in the same way, if there were not laws governing the spiritual universe within human nature (and all nature), great mystics like Jesus, the Buddha, and in our own age Mahatma Gandhi would not have been able to make their tremendous discoveries or, if they did, to communicate them to the rest of humanity.

The existence of these spiritual laws is what enabled Gandhi to say, in 1909 when his movement was at a low ebb and his opponents determined to not yield one inch to his demands, “I was perfectly indifferent to the numerical superiority of my opponents.”  Because, while numbers were on the opponents’ side — along with weapons, money, and the other accouterments of force — every spiritual law was against them; primarily the overriding law of unity to which all sages and most of modern science attest, which is the mother of all spiritual laws and which we can never break, though we stubbornly work at breaking ourselves against it.

This is why soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are killing themselves in record numbers — or living lives of hell when they return.  And why a U.S. Marine who handed out food and blankets to tsunami victims in 2004 said, “I have been serving my country for 34 years and this is the first day I’ve gotten any fulfillment out of it.”  One simple way of describing a future we all want might be, a future where we can get 34 years of fulfillment from our work for maybe a day or two of waste!

Thanks to the universality of these laws any one of us can master the “science” of Satyagraha, as Gandhi did, and be able to redress the evils of our time without perpetuating them.  The science of Satyagraha is harder to master than math or physics, because the latter are objective — and because they are still, at present, so entrenched in our media, our education — our entire culture.  Even some scientists, who should know better, go on describing reality as the motion of material particles a hundred years after the very existence of separate, material particles fled like shadows in the glare of quantum theory.  Such is the power of an entrenched worldview.

But if we practice Satyagraha and explain to others that it is based on principles now supported both by the best of modern science and the enduring wisdom of humanity down the ages, we are bound, in the long run, to overcome the dismal, dehumanizing worldview that is causing vast suffering in the world.  We have somehow created a system that draws upon the lowest, most destructive drives of our evolutionary heritage; but we engaging the best of which we are capable.  We will be holding up a much higher image of human nature and the “compassionate design” of the universe that is not only what all of us deeply want but happens to be grounded in Truth.

We can get far in this work with only two founding principles, which we do not need to take on faith; we can hold them as hypotheses and test them out in our own experiences:  that there are spiritual laws in the universe, and they can be discovered, and used; and that despite all appearances — and here I will use the exact words of my meditation teacher, Eknath Easwaran — “love flows at bottom in the heart of every human being.”

It follows naturally from the first principle, the “compassionate design” of the universe, that “there is enough in the world for everyone’s need” — the cornerstone of Gandhi’s economics.  It follows from the second that there is no conflict that does not have a win-win solution if we can only discover it (which is usually a matter of knowing what our real needs and those of others are) — that there is no offender who cannot be redeemed, no opponent who cannot be won over.

That the universe has a meaning, that it is pervaded by spiritual forces that every one of us can use to fulfill that meaning is the Good News of the 21^st Century.  Nonviolence is as native to this world as violence is inevitable in the “classical” view, often called dogmatic materialism.  That view is clinging stubbornly to life, even though it made us feel “like gypsies in the universe,” as one scientist put it, where the most important things about us — our ability to feel, to love — were explained away rather than celebrated.  It is high time to lay it to rest and we have every resource now at our disposal to manifest the brighter alternative.

RETURN TO METTA’S HOMEPAGE

Mike is teaching nonviolence and getting some help from Metta Center. Listen in . . .

Christopher Hedges’s selection from “War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning” puts war into a human context, rather than a romanticized one, and asks us to face the forces of war in the realms of culture, myth and crusade within our society.  It speaks of the power of war and how it can define us – has defined us – as a nation.  It is important to recognize the power and control that violence and war can have over individual and national psyches. Hedges, however, only leads us to question war and its tragic grip on us.  He doesn’t offer alternatives; indeed, he ends up also being lured into the importance of war by stating, “And tragically, war is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning.”  He fails to accept that there are alternative paths to find deep meaning in life.  If we don’t accept the forces of war, what can we – individually and collectively – replace it with?  That is where Metta Center is making such a valuable contribution with its materials, guidance and programs.

That is also where my Peace Studies course, offered to juniors and seniors, at Friends’ Central School, comes in.  At the current time, Peace Studies is offered every other year, this being an off year.  Last year, we began our time together with a study of many of the major terms in the Nonviolence Glossary available on the Metta Center website.  It was a helpful introduction to the conversations we had throughout the year regarding Gandhi, violence, nonviolence, theory and strategies applied during nonviolent freedom movements, and indeed the differences between Principled and Strategic nonviolence.  Little did I know that it would become much more than a simple, introductory unit for my students.

Over a period of about 3 weeks, we discussed two or three concepts from the Glossary each day, always seeking to find examples of how they played out in real life.  I would sometimes use a YouTube video clip to show how an incident exemplified the concept in a visual, historical context.  Through the year, we often returned to the Glossary concepts in our discussions.   It was amazing how, in responding to the assessment questions, the students would refer both to the articles we had read AND to the Metta Center Glossary.  Perhaps, it was because,over time, they became increasingly comfortable with the terms.  But, I also believe that those Glossary concepts became the solid foundation upon which the rest of my curriculum stood; they were the seed from which everything else grew.  The students found that they could not discuss and analyze important, historical, social events without referring to the Glossary.  

This fall, I have received a handful of emails from my students, who are now graduated and in college.  Some have told me how useful the course has been to them in their current studies.   Whether they be liberal arts, science, or business students, they now see the world differently.  Although many are not totally convinced that nonviolence is their calling, they recognize the wide range of nonviolent options available to them as individuals and to us as a world when conflicts arise, whether they be interpersonal in nature or at the level of war and its impact, so tragically described by Christopher Hedges.  Young people like my students give me great hope for our future, especially in a world where so many of them yearn for peaceful alternatives in the midst of violence.  It is, therefore, incumbent upon those of us who belong to an older generation to share such alternatives with them, so that they may improve upon what has been left to them.  I am delighted to work in tandem with Metta Center in fulfilling that mission.  

–Michael Crauderueff

Timo with Stephanie and Michael in Petaluma

Timo wrote explaining his work and life in Finland:

Since 1999, I have been working at Lapinjärvi Educational Center (LEC) (until 2008 as a full-timer, after that as a guest lecturer) and teaching Civil Service Men, i.e. conscientious objectors who refuse to do the military service. Finland is one of the few countries in Europe who still have obligatory military service (the others are Greece, Cyprus, Belarus, Swizerland and to some extend also Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Russia and Norway). In Finland about 65 % of the age group do military service, 7 % civil service (in schools, hospitals, universities, libraries, municipality offices, ngo’s etc.) and the rest don’t have to participate because of medical reasons. In LEC we give the men (aged 18-30) a one month training before they do their 10 months work-service. We give them lectures about fist aid, fire fighting, the system of obligatory military service, oil spill response, civil defence, democracy, history, nonviolence and many other things.

Even before finding the Metta Center from the internet I had visited India, “found Gandhi,” read his autobiography and other books about him, and watched the documentary “A Force More Powerful” (first time just by chance in a hotel room in Estonia). Inspired by the film (and the lives of Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi, MLK, Aung San Suu Kyi, etc.) I started a lecture called Nonviolent Conflict Resolution, with the aim of introducing the young audience to new heroes and of inspiring them to find out more about nonviolence.

One day I found Michael Nagler’s lectures from YouTube and the Metta Center’s page and this has helped me in many ways. I got many new perspectives on the subject: the spiritual side of nonviolence, the difference between technical and principled nonviolence, about constructive program, the link between antimaterialism and nonviolence. Interestingly, I also teach about “life skills”, which is a lecture, or actually a discussion about values and about the meaning of life. Metta Center’s material (including The Search for a Nonviolent Future) made me realize how closely connected my two lectures were. Nowadays the name of the lecture is simply “Nonviolence,”  the emphasis is on the principle of nonviolence and if I don’t have a separate lecture about life skills to the particular audience, I start even the nonviolence lecture by asking them, in small groups, to list out their most important values. In that way we get into discussion about happiness, what it is, what do we need to be happy etc., before we go in to the principles of nonviolence. I visit Metta Center’s web site every week to get more materials and ideas for my lectures, but mostly to just get inspired, again and again. 

Besides my work (which includes giving those lectures at LEC and writting a travel guide about Sarajevo) I do voluntary work for Peace Union Finland and Finnish Christian Peace Association. I also organise Loviisa Peace Forum, which is an annual event in Loviisa every August, a meeting point of people, ideas, cultures and religions. The aim of the Forum is to lessen fears of humankind, find new ideas and celebrate life. We have seminars, theatre -performances, movies, exhibitions etc., and I try to keep the nonviolence -theme in the forefront as much as possible.

RETURN TO METTA’S HOMEPAGE

Starting a revolution is like lighting a match; it risks becoming extinguished as quickly as it was lit. Sustaining a revolution, however, is like starting a fire, and ensuring that it has the fuel to burn as long as necessary. As an agent of change, I need that fire for as long as it takes for results to emerge, otherwise, I risk burn-out. How can we tell if our flame will prevail? We can know by checking our hearts: either we are burning with hatred and blame or with compassion and love.

Those who profess a commitment to what is called strategic nonviolence know how to start a revolution, that is, in the same way that one would have to fight if one is the weaker party: you do what you your opponent is trying to prevent you from doing, you cast all or most of the blame on them, and you draw upon the sympathies of the masses—the “reference public”– to express your power. In this approach it’s acceptable to use threat, humiliation, and coercion to get what you want,  and you often accept short-term and short-lived “success” as your goal. Nonviolence in this approach is simply refraining from physical violence while one’s inner frustrations and pains continue to grow, or are left wholly unresolved. After lighting the match of revolution, a person using nonviolence by this definition can walk away from the responsibility to carrying it forward for the long run. So a people left their guns at home this round? Where will it get them when they decide to take them back out because a limited vision of nonviolence did not bring about the deep changes needed? Look at Egypt “post-revolution,” and Libya, for case by case examples.

If I truly cared about the people I want to serve, however, I take the whole human being, their entire humanity, into account. So, while certain individuals gained fame and recognition for their contributions to starting revolutions in 2011 for example, I wonder if that recognition was not premature, if not short-sighted: we should ask ourselves, is this kind of revolution going to last? Witnessing one too many “progressives” shouting their discontent at cheering, furious crowds, we need to step back: can hatred, blame and resentment continue to inspire a long-term struggle? I, for one, have never found this approach entirely inspiring, mature, or even entirely honest.

The revolution, as we often say at the Metta Center, is not about putting a different kind of person in power; it is about awakening a different kind of power in people. The kind of satisfaction that comes from hating another human being is nothing compared to the satisfaction that comes from transforming hatred into respect and consideration of the humanity of the other. The sense of security that comes from rejoicing in the death and misery of another human being is the absolute lowest form, and it is nothing compared to the joy of rejoicing in the happiness, and sharing in the sorrow, of other people. In South Africa during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, they called this ‘Ubuntu,’ the concept that I affirm my humanity by affirming the humanity of others, or it is through other people that one is a person. In other words, one of the first ways of sustaining ourselves for revolution is by an awareness that I cannot do harm to another without harming myself. Peace psychologist Rachael MacNair has coined this truth in social science as ‘perpetration induced traumatic stress,’ or PITS. Yet just as I cannot harm another without harming myself, fortunately, I cannot truly benefit another without deeply experiencing that benefit in my own life. This is the point: if we want to create a society that takes humanity into consideration, the revolution will sustain itself when we learn how to do it ourselves, within ourselves. In the words of the great Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi:

 ”The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in those mental attitudes and values which shape the course of a nation’s development. A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of genuine success.”

Don’t get me wrong—I am not suggesting that there is not an outward struggle to wage; there is. I am suggesting that how we wage the struggle matters, and thus how we define our nonviolence also matters. If we limit our definition to simply “not using (physical) violence,” we should be suspicious that such a reduction can lead to more violence down the road because it denies our humanity. Further, we should not feel insulted if our opponents fail to see us for something more than threatening masses who endanger their personal i.e., physical, well-being, provoking further violence and repression from them.  But is this who we are? Are we out there to pick fights or to make lasting change?  If we widen our view to encompass a higher image of who we are,  nonviolence means channeling and transforming violent thoughts, refraining from violent insults and language, as well as not using the body as an instrument of harm but an instrument of peace. Not only do we have a strategy, but we have a higher vision of what is possible and who we are as people. That, to me, is revolutionary.

A way to begin affirming this deeper commitment is by turning our attention inward (e.g. by unplugging from the mass media, which are grabbing our attention outward).  Inner awareness is a tool to understanding our thoughts and emotions. We can look at it on the personal scale as well as the collective, but let’s start with individuals. When anger, frustration and resentment arise, don’t immediately blame others or take it out on the person next to you, even if they did provoke you. Neuroscience shows that human beings will respond negatively to threats, whether real or imagined Take a walk, get exercise and give yourself detachment from the visceral response (which studies show take about an hour to pass through before we can begin to calm down, but experience tells me that this can take days and weeks).  Upon achieving detachment from the situation, if you realize that the threat is real and not imagined, make a strategy for solving the problem nonviolently and constructively. You are not repressing anger, you are simply harnessing it for its full effectiveness. Unharnessed anger is an unlocked gateway to violent behavior which never is a one time occurrence, it will happen again; when it is harnessed, you can look squarely at the problem and direct that energy directly to it and solve it permanently. As we often quote Martin Luther King referring to anger in the Civil Rights movement, “We did not cause outbursts of anger. We harnessed anger under discipline for maximum effect.” Included in this effect is a rerouting of the violent energy so it does not recur as such.

This turning inward is a turning away from our conditioned responses that we have developed over time to maintain some kind of order in our minds. It is time we moved away from cruelty and alienation, and refused to give it a place in our toolkits of revolution. We can challenge ourselves all day long, as a personal nonviolence training; every small victory in becoming kinder is fuel for the fire for the long-term struggle for freedom. It is much harder than strategic nonviolence, and realizes the true meaning of “civil” in “civil resistance.”

Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi reminds us, “Love is that fire which when kindled burns everything else away.”

After that revolution, what remains? It’s time we found out.

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