about metta

PARADIGMS DON’T SHIFT (it’s helpful to remember), unless people do. And if we are to resolve the major crisis of our times, people will have to begin to reverse what Daniel Ellsberg has called “five thousand years of imperial, patriarchal culture based on warfare.” In the short run, we must disarm, and quickly. But the only permanent way we can disestablish the war system, as Michael Nagler writes, “is through the minds and actions of all of us who more or less unconsciously create that system.”

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.

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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