In this TeleSeminar, Michael Nagler and Stephanie Van Hook of the Metta Center for Nonviolence will go into the connection between person power, constructive program, and non-violent resistance (the three phases of the Metta Center’s Roadmap). They will begin with the real beginning: how can each of us empower her or himself through spiritual disciplines like meditation and the use of a mantram, along with other tools for realizing our highest potential as “spiritual warriors.”

The approach at the Metta Center has always been “big picture:” Nonviolence, when properly understood, is the key issue underlying virtually every problem in our present system, and so we try to ground ourselves in a basic understanding of this force that Gandhi called “the greatest force available to humanity” and work out the structure of its applications on down to the most practical details. Transition towns for us, as you can see from our Roadmap, are a key element in transformation toward a livable future. They are the perfect testing ground for the strategies of a life based on nonviolence, which implies “perfect justice all round in every department of life” – including humanity’s living relationship with nature. They are the equivalent of Gandhi’s ashrams (he founded four of them in his career), serving as headquarters and training centers for revolution both in its active sense, where it involves direct resistance, and its constructive sense – what Buckminster Fuller called building the world you want as a powerful basis for putting the one you don’t want out of its misery.

See the Metta Center’s animated short video “A New Story of US” for a great primer.  Learn more at Transition United States.