Michael will be interviewed Tuesday, November 17th from 1-2 pm PST on Conversations with Michael Stone , a program featuring “leading edge thinkers in the areas of Environmental Restoration, Social Justice and Spiritual fulfillment,” on KVMR, in Nevada City, CA. Live stream will be available here, or if you happen to be in the Nevada… read more
Posts by Prof. Michael Nagler
Welcome to the Metta Center!
We are so pleased to invite you to stop by our lovely new office on — yes! — 1730 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way in Berkeley (betw. Francisco and Delaware). Our phone number and emails remain the same but we have much more room and can have meetings of our own. The front room will… read more
The ‘Real’ 9/11: a Celebration
Some of you may know that this is the 103rd anniversary of the birth of [[Satyagraha]]: September 11th, 1906 at the Empire Jewish Theater in Johannesburg, South Africa. Not the birth of the principle, which as Gandhi said was already ‘as old as the hills,’ but the launching of his mighty ‘experiments with Truth’ —… read more
Mirror Neurons
Mirror neurons in the brain fire not only when an animal acts, but also when an animal observes another animal act. Brain scientists at the University of Parma discovered these neurons in the late 1980′s. The discovery was made using new, non-invasive technologies that enable scientists to detect the activity or firing of single neurons… read more
Is This Really About Healthcare?
Like many, I have been taken aback by the coarse violence — and effective organization — of the backlash against President Obama’s proposed healthcare package. The lying, shouting, and disruption of what might have been reasoned debates bodes ill for the political culture, and hence the political destiny, of this country. During the neoconservative hysteria… read more
A Tale of Two Worldviews
by Michael Nagler In the discourse that plays itself out on the nation’s bumper stickers there is a ‘dialogue’ (or at least a face-off) between two messages. The first, and more familiar, is GOD SAVE AMERICA — not too prominent in West Marin, but we’ve all seen some. The other is the reaction: GOD SAVE… read more
The Adventure that is Metta
by Michael Nagler One of the things we’ve been saying and hearing about us lately is that what we are is as significant as what we do. Not that we’d find it easy to define what we are as a group; but it’s worth a try because the way people are forming new associations today… read more
The Cassandra Syndrome
Last month, 57 people have lost their lives in eight mass shootings across America. “The killing grounds,” Timothy Egan wrote in the New York Times last week, “include a nursing home, a center for new immigrants, a child’s bedroom. Before that it was a church, a college, a daycare center.” It is hard to argue… read more
Silver Linings
Forward-looking thinkers who are — for now — on the ‘prophetic’ fringe of mainstream economics have been saying for some time that the shocking fragility of our fiscal system, and our economy generally, is an ‘opportunity’ as well as a ‘crisis.’ In the words of David Korten of the Positive Futures Network, what we should… read more
Of Hope and Disappointment
“I feel like his campaign swindled the people of the USA into believing his administration would be something it surely will not be. “ On my 72nd birthday I stood in UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza where, many years before, I was passionately involved in the Free Speech Movement, and watched Barack Obama become the 44th… read more
