Metta’s Opinion

Traveling into the Heart of Gandhi’s Work

While connecting with friends and supporters on Facebook earlier today, we noticed the following post by Benjamin Brown, who participated in portions of our Certificate in Nonviolence Studies and is currently in Mumbai, India. We found his post so touching that we asked his permission to share his words. We quote him directly. All photos courtesy of Benjamin Brown.

Just leaving the Gandhi House “Mani Bhavan,” in central Mumbai… Words aren’t really gonna do it here, but I’ll try anyways:

So I was told I’d probably stay for an hour or so, and I ended up staying for 6… Two minutes after I walked in, suddenly overcome with emotion, I excused myself, and cried my eyes out in the side ally, as all the memories flooded back from Gandhi books & movies I’d studied over the past couple years… Whoa… I’m actually here. The heart of the largest nonviolent campaign ever waged in human history… The energy in this place and within myself is palpable, like a pilgrimage I didn’t even know I was on…

A little background: Mani Bhavan served as Gandhi’s Mumbai headquarters from 1917-1934. He learned carding and spinning here, which later became the “charka,” or keystone symbol / leverage point of India’s Independence. Gandhi issued his unregistered weekly bulletin “Satyagraha” from here. He organized boycotts on foreign cloth, fasted in protest of riots, and got previously banned literature re-legalized from here. He called the country to observe January 26th as Independence Day from Mani Bhavan, and much much more…

Today, the building, (a 4 story mansion on an amazingly quiet street for Mumbai), serves as the homely Gandhi Museum. It holds the largest collection of books about Gandhi, read by Gandhi, and written by Gandhi. His personal spinning wheel is housed here, along with many other items that he used during his stays. There are extensive timelines, photographs, & texts about his life and India’s fight for liberation. My favorite part however, (though I don’t think I was supposed to be there), was on the roof, where Gandhiji’s big canvas tent was often set up outside of the monsoon season.

I laid in the shade of the staircase housing, listening to the sounds of the city below, and tried to imagine those hot summer days he spent up here reading, resting, and helping to create a new world. I wondered what his inner state must have been in these times of deep contemplation and creativity. I caught what I thought to be some essence of this man as I dozed off to sleep, and proceeded to have several really vivid dreams along these lines…

I’ll be gestating on these for a while, I’m sure, but in short I’d like to simply state that “My life has always been, and is now more consciously coming into service of Life.” This is no longer a test drive, something to be scared of or make trivial. This is IT. And much like Gandhi, I’m beginning to take it a lot more seriously… Today was a mile marker, a landmark on my path by which to guide myself… And I’m deeply grateful for it.

I’m also deeply grateful for a couple special people, without whose inspiration, I probably wouldn’t have found myself here, literally or metaphorically: Michael Nagler, Stephanie Van Hook, & Nicholas Ernesto Sismil of The Metta Center for Nonviolence Education… Thank you all for helping to bring the heart of Gandhi’s work into my life. It has and will continue to be a very special thing for me…

Beyond Ferguson: the Deeper Issue

Posted on December 8, 2014

by Prof. Michael Nagler

Michael Nagler’s op-ed as seen here first appeared at HuntingtonNews.net on December 4, 2014. You may also want to read The Shanti Sena Network’s response to Ferguson we posted last week.

It can only be a good thing that the attention of the nation is focused on the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and its aftermath. However, if the debate continues to be on the details of this particular case–many of which will likely never be known–or even on the growing problem of police heavy-handedness, or even the besetting problem of racism in America, we will never reach a solution to these tragedies.

As one minister from the region pointed out, every time a black person is killed by a white police officer, the country is split in two. What we need is a national dialogue on unity, on healing. I agree; but I think we need to go even further.

We need to remember the prophetic words that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. pronounced from the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, in his famous sermon called Beyond Vietnam: “The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit,” he said, and to cure this malady “we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” King instinctively knew and often said that racism was a form of violence, so until violence itself was addressed racism would never leave us. And he was right.

I am not in the habit of patronizing the mainstream media, but I did see that even as the reports and debates over Ferguson rolled on last week they were interspersed, on the TV set in the men’s locker room at the gym I go to, with a “reality” show where a woman sneered in rage against someone else (not being able to hear the sound from the room I was in only made the mental state of the people clearer). Sure enough, the word RAGE in huge letters came on the screen, evidently the name of this show or the whole program, and indeed the more she raged the more the audience roared in approval. Am I watching a gladiatorial game in ancient Rome or a reality show in America, I asked myself. My point is this: if we do not want the brutality of some policemen, or of anyone else, we will have to stop the brutalization of the human image that has become, even since King’s day, a norm of popular “entertainment.”

No act of violence occurs in a vacuum; it occurs in an atmosphere, a climate, a culture. In the Beyond Vietnam speech King connected the dots between the racism of our northern or southern ghettos and the violence that pervaded our “policy and values.” We can specify today that the way we’re supporting wrong policies and wrong values is very largely with the dehumanization, what he called the “thing-orientation” of our commercial media. A lot of good research has established this point – research that is no less valid for its being largely ignored.

Of course, there are other things we can do to address the kind of violence of which the tragic killing of Michael Brown has become an icon. We can stop militarizing the police – a blatant violation of the principle, enshrined in the Posse Comitatus Act in this country, that in a democracy military forces are not to be used against its own people. We can greatly spread and support the establishment of peace teams that have been so effective – often moreso than, and appreciated by, local police – in making police intervention unnecessary in certain community situations and calming disturbances that are likely to occur after a tragedy like this one. But measures like these by themselves will not go far enough unless we are also addressing the root cause, the cause that underlies racism itself, which is violence. And since a large part of today’s violence comes from the images of who we are and how we are to relate to one another, and since these images are put before us most effectively by our violent media, there is one simple step every one of us can take: not to watch them. This is the platform on which we can build the world of trust and peace we seem to be crying for, a world in which not only police brutality but all kinds of violence are all but gone.

Ferguson Statement- Shanti Sena Network

Posted on December 4, 2014

by Metta Center

Response to Ferguson from the Shanti Sena Network:

Whether or not you believe that Darren Wilson is guilty, no one can deny that trust in the American police force is really low. This trust is especially low in communities of color and low income communities. A list of demands from Ferguson protestors included: a plan to end racial profiling, more diversity in the police force, investigating criminalization of communities of color, an end to over-policing and criminalization of poverty, and a representative police force and intentional officer training. In regards to the last demand mentioned, it was written,

“We believe that a police force should be representative of those citizens that it is designed to serve and protect.”

Can we really reform the police? While there may be a place for reform, most people are not aware of alternatives to the police. For those involved in the Shanti Sena Network, the idea of ‘peace teams’ is the cutting edge of alternative community security that is just beginning to take shape.

What are Peace Teams? The idea for peace teams (or Shanti Sena) originated by Gandhi who believed that in order for true peace to reign, societies must have trained groups of people dedicated to nonviolence and nonviolent conflict transformation. The job of these teams or armies would be the same as the police or military, with one caveat: their brand of serving and protecting would be 100% committed to nonviolence and only use nonviolent methods. While peace teams have been sent overseas with a high success rate for international conflict intervention through such organizations as Nonviolent Peaceforce, Peace Brigades International, and others, domestic community based peace teams are a new development that organizations such as Meta Peace Team, DC Peace Team, Emergency Peace Teams, and others are exploring.

What is UCP? “Unarmed civilian peacekeeping (UCP) refers to the use of unarmed civilians to do ‘peacekeeping’. Peacekeeping is about preventing, reducing and stopping violence. Unarmed civilian peacekeeping is a generic term that gives recognition to a wide range of activities by unarmed civilians to reduce violence and protect civilians in situations of violent conflict.” -from Nonviolentpeaceforce.org

Why are these things relevant to Ferguson/police brutality?

Protestors can fight for police reform, and they may see some changes (President Obama recently announced he is setting up a task force to see how to improve modern day policing, and met with activists along with Vice President Biden and Eric Holder). A few changes here and there do not address the underlying structural violence of the police that seems built into a system that not only targets communities of color and low income people, but also seems at times to enforce unjust laws and suppress constitutional freedom, thus contributing to the continuation of the cycle of violence; think, for example, of the cruelty perpetuated in the prisons. So if we want to move beyond small reforms here and there, how can we harness the energy of recent protests and use it for concrete action towards our goal of major structural change?

We want to actually address the conditions that cultivate criminal acts, and thus get to the source of the problem, so we can have REAL long term change. That is why it is absolutely important that we empower ourselves with the tools of nonviolent de-escalation, conflict intervention, and restorative justice practices so that local communities can learn how to transform their own conflicts and be responsible for their own security. We are passionate about safety, justice, peace, courageous action and humane treatment of all.

Building this alternative to the police is in line with what Gandhi called ‘Constructive Program.’ We seek to create new structures that run parallel to existing structures. This way we do not have to only spend our energy in protest and demanding reform, but we can be actively engaged in creation of a new infrastructure that truly fits the needs of each community.

So if you share the passion that the protestors feel and desire a change, we invite you to become involved and learn more about what we believe might become the future of security.

On Fear: An Excercise in Personal Power

Posted on November 23, 2014

by Kimberlyn David

A funny thing happens when I receive love, appreciation, support: I freak out. An intense fear permeates the whole body. From the outside, I probably appear calm (unless you’re standing right next to me, in which case you’ll notice my face growing red and sweaty). But on the inside, I experience a frenetic energy that muddles my thinking and tightens my breathing. Curious how fear shows up for us sometimes, isn’t it?

Put me in the midst of interpersonal turmoil, and I’ll sail through it with total clarity and confidence. Talk someone out of stabbing another person? Hold my mental own against a very strong man on an alcohol-induced rampage? I’ve done both with zero hesitation or fear. I used to wobble at the sight of the standard house spider. I now live with jungle for a backyard, and tarantulas bigger than my hand occasionally sneak into my casita, and I mindfully relocate them. But place me in an intimate social setting, and the survival instincts trip false alarms; I habitually go haywire. What do you experience when fear snags you?

While I may be fearless in shaky physical situations, I can nevertheless get rocked off center by feelings of unworthiness, the emotional expression of fearing connection. The inner child’s voice tells me not to trust closeness. “Don’t go there,” she warns. “It’s unreliable, and it’ll lead to hurt and humiliation.”

At Metta Center, we tend to put being before doing. Our staff and board meetings typically open with the sharing of personal revelations—in short, the nurturing of loving, appreciative and supportive connections. This revealing places me squarely in my discomfort zone. My voice quivers, I rush through words and forget important points. During my first board meeting, joined by phone, fearful feelings jolted me with adrenaline. The flight mechanism kicked into high gear, but of course there was nothing to run from—or to. While sitting in my chair with the phone muted, I found release in a burst of tears. Good, I thought. Let the tensity rise. Let it rise!

Transformation, individual as well as societal, depends on the arising and dissolving of unreleased tensions. It can be discomforting to reveal who we really are—in so doing, we go against the grain of superficial interactions. What a risky feat in a culture that claims we’re empty-headed consumers on an insatiable quest for material pleasure and in a never-ending race to the top (wherever that is). Revealing who we are, then, is an obstructive rejection of separation and a constructive reappropriation of our physical, mental and spiritual energies.

A couple of weeks ago, Metta Center asked me to join their staff as Director of Communications. I’m both honored and humbled to contribute my love for creative communications in a meaningful way. The world needs stories that elevate the understanding of our inherent human worth and potential, and I’m ready to help bring those stories into being. The members of Metta Center’s team are my collaborators and spiritual teachers rolled into one. By inviting me to join the staff, they’ve graced me with a golden key to my svadharma, what our founder and president Michael Nagler calls “the articulation of your capacities with the needs of the world in which you find yourself.”

Work that offers us no chance to practice, develop and maintain peace and harmony for ourselves and the people we share our everyday lives with is work humanity no longer needs. May we all find and live our svadharma.

If anything I’ve shared in this post resonates with you, you may be interested in a day-long retreat on personal power hosted by Michael Nagler, Stephanie Van Hook and Linda Sartor. Scheduled for December 7, the retreat is called “Turning Fear Into Power.” If you’ll be in the Santa Rosa, CA area, you can register for it here.

Ahimsa Center Conference 2014

Posted on November 17, 2014

by Stephanie Steiner

I recently had the opportunity to attend the Ahimsa Center biannual conference on nonviolence at California Polytechnic University Pomona, and in this blog post I would like to share with you a round-up of the conference presentations and a little about my own experience, takeaways, reflections and lingering questions.

-Stephanie Knox Cubbon, Metta’s Director of Education

“Compassion is the radicalism of our time.”

-His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

Background

The Ahimsa Center was founded in 2004 by Dr. Tara Sethia, a distinguished scholar, author, nonviolence practitioner and history professor at CSU Pomona. In addition to hosting the conference, the center houses the minor in Nonviolence Studies which Dr. Sethia coordinates, a biannual summer fellowship for K-12 educators to learn about nonviolence, and numerous other educational programs and outreach activities on campus and in the local community. This year’s conference theme was Care, Compassion and Mindfulness, and the panelists included educators, religious scholars, psychologists, designers, and artists – people from a wide variety of fields who are incorporating these themes into their work. The interdisciplinary approach led to an enriching cross-pollination of ideas and allowed each of us to bring in new perspectives from other fields.

Some of the key themes during the conference included:

Happiness and fulfillment come from within us

In his opening talk, Dr. Allan Wallace of the Santa Barbara Institute of Consciousness Studies talked about “cultivating conative intelligence.” He explained conation as the mental faculty of purpose, desire, will to perform an action, or volition. He described conative unintelligence as when we try to escape suffering, we run right towards it, primarily through craving and attachment (which causes more suffering).

What does this have to do with happiness? He discussed two types of happiness, hedonic happiness, the stimulus-driven pleasure derived from what we get from the world (such as through food, sex, and material goods), and eudaimonic or genuine happiness, which is derived from what we bring to the world. Dr. Wallace explained, “As long as we are seeking happiness through hedonic pleasures, we are gamblers and the house always wins.” The materialistic worldview and consumer way of life that we find ourselves in currently (the “old story”) is hedonistic, and is essentially doomed. Dr. Wallace urged us to develop a richer vision of a good life, which includes meditation (which he compared to “mental hygiene”) as well as shifting our priorities towards finding purpose and meaning in life. If you know Metta’s work, this should sound familiar! What Dr. Wallace was saying resonates with the second of Metta’s five propositions in our vision, namely that we cannot be fulfilled through consumption (as much as the media would like us to believe), and can only find fulfillment through discovering our own person power and through the expansion of our relationships. Check out Metta’s course on the Meaning of Life for more on that subject!

We are mind, body and spirit

Shamini Jain shared with us the fascinating research she is doing through the Consciousness and Healing Initiative to research the “biofield” therapies – energy therapies such as reiki, acupuncture, and others that work with what ancient healing traditions call the energy body (prana, chi, qi). Emphasizing that we are mind, body and spirit, she said all of these modalities have some similarities, such as:

the assumptions that consciousness is primary and that healing takes place on all levels (mind, body & spirit)
the practitioner engages in grounding, letting go of ego and connecting with universal energy
the practitioner uses gentle touch that directs energy flow through the system, and
the practitioner consciously intends for the patient’s highest good.

Her research attempts to bridge the gap between ancient traditions and modern science, which is an important contribution to the field of nonviolence!

Mindfulness and Moral Injury

Lisa Dale Miller talked about her work using mindfulness with veterans to heal moral injury, what she described as, in contrast to PTSD, the trauma induced by witnessing or actually compromising one’s own morals judgment. For example, moral injury may result from the deep grief and regret a soldier might feel for carrying out orders that go against their moral compass. In her work, she has found a “toolbox of awakened presence” that veterans can self-apply to heal from moral injury, such as nonharming, nonhatred, nongreed, and kind recognition to whatever comes. Her presentation made me reflect on the role that we can play to support the members in our communties who may be suffering from this kind of trauma, and how we might contribute to the collective healing needed from our engagement in decades of war.

Peace Ecology

Randall Amster, author of the new book Peace Ecology, shared with us about ethics of care for the Earth, and discussed the peacebuilding and transformational potential of the Earth, since it’s what we all have in common. He discussed the relationship between human-to-human and human-environmental conflict, and asked the question “How can we alter the cycle (of violence)?” While he acknowledged that window of opportunity for change is closing rapidly in terms of our environmental challenges, he holds the view that we still have potential to change if we can muster the will and take action.

Mindful Parenting

Mindful parenting was also a theme, and Kozo Hattori of Raising Compassionate Boys told us about his efforts to raise instill compassion in his sons. He humbly told his own struggles as a parent to raise compassionate boys in our society, and expressed how mistakes are opportunities to role model compassion and forgiveness. His presentation touched upon themes of gender and how societally-imposed gender roles are hurtful to all genders.

Discipline, selfless service, nonattachment

Themes from Vedantic philosophy, Buddhism, yoga, and Jainism also appeared throughout the conference. Chris Chapple of Loyola Marymount University (which has the first Master of Arts program in Yoga Studies in the US) discussed the four immeasureables (lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity) and the Bhagavad Gita. One of the themes that stood out to me was tapas – the will to develop a rhythm of purification, essentially spiritual discipline to let go and burn away (tapas literally means fire) anything that is keeping you from your true self, your highest potential. In my own life and practice lately, I have been contemplating this theme a lot, as we live in a society that generally tries to pull us away from, rather than support us in, our spiritual practice. In order to discover our own person power, we have to create some effort. The state of our world requires us to be disciplined with our intentions and actions, and it’s a helpful reminder that all of the wisdom traditions emphasize discipline and an important part of the spiritual path.

Dr. Padmanabh Jain, professor emeritus of UC Berkeley, discussed the connection between ahimsa and aparigraha (nonclinging or nonattachment), saying that ahimsa is impossible without aparigraha, and that everything in excess is himsa, harming or violence. This made me reflect on our current culture: What does this say about our society, which puts an emphasis on overconsumption and excess? What might happen if we think about our overconsumption as a form of violence? Dr. Jain encouraged us to consider that we already have enough – another helpful reminder.

Gandhi and Restorative Justice

Dr. Veena Howard shared about Gandhi’s strategy for restorative justice and how we desperately need this approach in the US, which has the highest prison population in the world. Gandhi thought of crime as disease, and that as a society we need to defeat crime but not criminals, and to understand and take responsibility for the conditions we are collectively creating that result crime. Click here to access Metta’s self-study resources on restorative justice and nonviolence.

Education

The last panel of the conference was on mindfulness in education, which gave me much food for thought. Christian Bracho asked us to remember the teachers who impacted us the most, and said in all likelihood, it wasn’t a teacher who knew the content, but it was someone who really cared. For me this rang true, as I immediately thought of Mademoiselle Konig and Mr. Hoffman, my high school French and history teachers, who were two of the most caring teachers I encountered in my scholastic career. Who were the teachers who impacted you the most?

Another idea that emerged from the panel was that of peer coaching, and this has been on my mind a lot with respect to peace education. A lot of times, those of us who are doing peace and nonviolence education may feel isolated, like we are the only ones doing it, and we don’t really have the means to reflect on our own practice and get new ideas. So my personal goal after this conference is:

a) To start a peer peace education meetup/coaching group in San Diego, where I live (and if you’re reading this, why not start one where you are?)

b) If you are reading this blog and this idea interests you, I would also consider starting a monthly Google Hangout for those of us who may be in different places to connect virtually to discuss peace and nonviolence education. Interested? Email me! education@mettacenter.org

Vikas Shrivastava talked about the Mindful School Project, and what struck me most about his presentation is that he shared about lessons learned from what he called “a disaster.” Rather than share with us a success story (which is often the case in public presentations), he shared about what didn’t work. He talked about our tendency to project-ify and certify everything, to make everything into a framework that we can then sell and replicate, but in his opinion this is not necessarily the best way forward. He offered some suggestions, such as:

Working within your realm of influence (and not feeling the need to “scale up”)
Let go of the “franchise dream” (creating something that can be replicated)
Stay focused on the work you have
Serve at the request of others
Your life is your journey

In my notes I wrote “more teacher training institutes? Community workshops?” as ideas the percolated during his talk. In a discussion after the panel, some of the Ahimsa Center graduates (of the teacher training institute) discussed the need for more professional development opportunities in this area, which has my wheels churning.

Selfless Service, Gift Ecology

Finally, the closing session was with the ever-inspiring Nipun Mehta of ServiceSpace.org, who discussed how being consumers is not our highest potential as human beings, and we unlock our greatest potential when we engage in selfless service. He also talked about the power of internal transformation, and how Gandhi’s internal transformation was really the engine of India’s liberation. He shared with us the principles of Service Space, which are:

Be volunteer run – unleash the power of many to see the collective intelligence that emerges
Don’t fundraise – unleash a gift ecology, and people’s cup of gratitude overflows
Focus on the small – unleash the ripple effect

He also talked about our need to think of different kinds of capital other than money, such as time, and how we are blind to other forms of “capital.” He urged us to think differently about abundance, saying none of us were born into this world empty-handed. To help broaden our ideas of capital and abundance, he invited us to ask ourselves, “How can I help people today? What do we have, and how can we work with what we have?” Some of the best conversations took place around the meals that were part of the conference program (which were all vegetarian! You know you are at a good conference when vegan cupcakes are on the menu :). The mealtimes gave us lots of opportunities to connect, network, and engage in rich discussions around these themes. I left the conference feeling very invigorated, with lots of questions, and with lots of new friends and connections with whom I can grapple with these questions.

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As I returned home to my neighborhood, brimming with inspiration from the weekend, I heard the news that the remains of the 43 missing students in Mexico had been found. The students were studying to be teachers, and were known for their activism around social justice issues, reminding me that we live in a world where teaching and learning about the state of the world – and critiquing it – can get you killed. As the optimism and inspiration I was filled with met the despair and pain I felt from acknowledging this reality, I was reminded that we have so much work to do. But I feel prepared, and charged, to do that work. It’s our responsibility.

Meditation: A Brief Reflection

Posted on October 28, 2014

by Kimberlyn David

“Meditation is not evasion; it is a serene encounter with reality.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

I’ve been practicing meditation for more than two years, and I come to this realization each and every time I sit: Meditation meets us where we’re at in life, opening and strengthening our hearts and minds where they most need to be.

As Eknath Easwaran and other masters have pointed out, meditation can’t be understood from an intellectual standpoint. It’s by practicing that we develop the calm and wisdom needed to move through life with grace and ease, to bring greater peace into the world.

None of us is born enlightened—we all have a context that shapes who we are and become. Childhood poverty and rape deposited stones in my heart, hardening me in ways I couldn’t see or feel until I began meditating at the age of 39. Through my practice sessions, I regularly confront and dislodge these stones. Each extraction leads me to a fresh sense of freedom.

With each stone-plucking, I also gain a more profound compassion for others: it’s by seeing and feeling the contours of my own stonework that I can truly comprehend the ways in which life bestows difficulties upon everyone. Compassion means to suffer with. The word evolved from the Latin roots of com, or with, and patī, to suffer. In these terms, suffering connotes the basic ups and downs all of us go through just by the nature of being alive.

None of us escapes pain, upsets, or failures. They’re factors of life. But some of us are so saddled by emotional burdens that we can’t feel a deeper love for ourselves or others. As a society, it would behoove us to provide everyone accessible, supportive ways to confront and transform our life wounds. It’s an important piece of the Constructive Program pie, because societal harmony depends on widescale healing and compassion, the very masonry of cooperation.

I’ve heard from people who don’t meditate that I’ve got my head in the clouds—all that sitting accomplishes nothing but self-absorption, they say. My response? Meditation isn’t about creating our own private bliss bubbles. It’s about ameliorating our suffering and making spiritual leaps so that we can fearlessly serve humanity in our own loving ways.

For some of us that might mean being more present with our children or life partners; for others of us that could look like speaking truth to power, committing civil disobedience, building economic alternatives. No matter how small or large the role, each contribution matters. As poet Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes:

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.

Time and again, it’s the meditation that reminds me to strengthen my capacity for compassion and love—and to forgive myself when I slip and reenact ingrained patterns. It also helps me remember that the smallest actions can serve others in the most heart-inspired ways. On any given day, our greatest contribution in life could be bringing a smile to a stranger’s face. We never know: one smile could be the action that tips us toward enduring good, the peace we’re all looking for.

Addendum: If you’re wondering how to bridge your meditation practice with peacemaking work, you’ll find inspiration in Michael Nagler’s Meditation for Peacemakers. This insightful e-book covers a lot of historical-spiritual ground.

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? (Who Shall Guard the Guardians?)

Posted on October 23, 2014

by Prof. Michael Nagler

Originally posted on Tikkun Daily Blog on October 23, 2014.

Family members demand justice in Iguala, Guerrero. Credit: Creative Commons/The Yucatan Times

I’ve just come from a three-hour conversation with Pietro Ameglio Patella, prominent Mexican professor and nonviolent activist, and an old friend. He was in the country with his friend Carlos Moreno who has been searching for his son for three years without any cooperation from the official parties – indeed not only that, it has made him a target of death threats himself.

The situation in México is, without exaggeration, catastrophic. Anyone can be taken off at any time, and both drug lords and the government operate with complete impunity. Gangs come and measure your house or your business and charge you for “protection” by the yard, and recently a radio journalist was killed right in the middle of a broadcast by someone who entered the studio, fired four shots point blank and calmly walked out. As Patella told me, “our wives are in a constant panic; we don’t know from which direction the bullets could come.” No government agency offers help to the anguished parents seeking information about their lost children or other loved ones, not to mention doing anything to control the violence, because indeed they are part of it. Patella and Moreno reject the definition of “failed state” for Mexico today. Rather, they told me, it’s a criminal state.

But now, it seems, the criminal state may have gone too far. On September 26, police fired upon forty-three students, who had come to the town of Iguala in Guerrero for teacher training,as they sat in buses. The students were raising funds for a trip to Mexico City to participate in a memorial of the Tlatelolco student massacre of October 2, 1968. Six students were killed and one remains in a coma; the others were taken off by the police and handed over to the local drug gang. They have not been found. Tenmass graves have been discovered during the search with human remains, none of which to date turns out to match the missing students. Even this town in a particularly violence-torn region of the country, and the country itself, is in shock.

The Iguala massacre, as it’s now called, came at a time when the President of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto had just been in the U.S. portraying his country as “peaceful Mexico” thanks to the legislative reforms he instituted since taking office two years ago – with loud support from, for example, Hillary Clinton. The blatant complicity of the police has surfaced what every Mexican knows (if he or she cares to), that, in the words of Javier Oliva, coordinator of the defense and national security program at Mexico’s National Autonomous University, Iguala has “a municipal authority at the repressive service of organized crime against society.” In this respect, Iguala is no different from most parts of the country, except, of course, for Zapatista-controlled Chiapas where, if anywhere, the future of Mexico is being nurtured in radical social experiments.

Michael Nagler (center) with Carlos Moreno (far left) and Pietro Ameglio Patella (left) at the Joan B. Kroc Peace & Justice Institute at the University of San Diego on October 18. Credit: Patrick Hiller

Patella and Moreno had just come from Washington where they lobbied for a more appropriate response from the U.S. to the massacre, which is creating the worst political crisis in Mexico in forty years. A march on the Mexican Embassy in D.C. was planned for October 22^nd; but we are all in agreement that there, as in the U.S. (I’ve just been discussing this point with author and environmentalist Bill McKibben), with a situation this dire marches are not enough. In terms of a model called the conflict escalation curve we developed at Metta some time ago, when you’ve marched and gone home without a substantial response you have passed phase one of the curve, and now it’s time for satyagraha: nonviolent resistance. In the U.S. I’ve proposed that we should a) lay out a timetable of concrete demands for the reversal of climate destruction, b) lay out an equally concrete set of alternatives that make such a drastic change thinkable (e.g. the conversion to clean energy sources in Germany), andc) a description of what the government or corporate entities we’re addressing will have to face in the form of massive civil disobedience if they do not comply.

What would a nonviolent response look like in Mexico? As it happens, Latin America is the cradle of one of the most successful forms of nonviolence that’s been developed since the days of Gandhi and King, called protective accompaniment. Trained nonviolent activists have been going into Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and elsewhere to accompany threatened human rights workers around the clock, with no small success. No protected person or any third-party intervener has actually been killed on the job, and in one case at least, an incredibly small number of people in Guatemala in the 1980s made it possible for a key organization to function and play a key role in the initiation of a peace process. That same organization, Peace Brigades International, is now operating on a small scale in Mexico. Patella urgently expressed that a lot more of this support could make a critical difference. Protecting key persons could allow some measure of accountability that could break the cycle of crime and impunity (look at the genocide conviction that was recently obtained against former Guatemalan President Ríos Montt).

This, along with other ongoing measures, could open the space to address the deeper issues. There is a huge section of youth in Mexico called “ni-nis,” with ni trabajo, ni educación (neither work nor education) leaving them ripe for recruitment into the gangs. And of course, there is the northern neighbor who buys the drugs and furnishes the weapons to keep them flowing, over the bodies of the poorest Mexicans. There is the culture of corruption there (and not so far off here). These are deep, deep problems, but we might just have a chance now to get some traction on them if we can use the shock created by the Iguala massacre to support Pietro Ameglio Patella and his colleagues who are struggling heroically to raise the banner of nonviolence in a desperate world.

The Great Debaters

Posted on October 23, 2014

by Metta Center

By: Mercedes Mack

“Who is the judge?”

“The judge is God.”

“Why is He God?”

“Because He decides who wins or loses. Not my opponent.”

“Who is your opponent?”

“He does not exist.”

“Why does he not exist?”

“Because he is a mere dissenting voice of the truth I speak!”

c. 2007, Directed by Denzel Washington. A biopic based on the true story of Melvin B. Tolson (Denzel Washington), a professor at Wiley College, Texas. Set against the backdrop of Jim Crow Texas, the film depicts the journey of the Wiley College debate team, created and coached by Tolson into a nearly undefeated season that included the first debate between white and African American students in the U.S. But that’s not why this movie is awesome.

This movie is awesome because at first glance, the film is a classic underdog tale of Wiley College debate team set in the backdrop of the Jim Crow South with caliber acting and very resilient characters. Looking closer, there is an obvious undercurrent of nonviolent resistance and the tough recurring question of what do we have to do versus what we can or want to do.

There are multiple scenes in the film that address these questions- the secret meetings led by Professor Tolson, when Dr. James Farmer hits a white farmer’s pig, and other segregation-violence topics addressed in various debates. In the film, these questions are constantly contemplated as characters navigated the Jim Crowe system and each grappled with how they could change it.

One of my favorite scenes in the movie is the final debate between Wiley College and Harvard. Their debate topic is- Civil disobedience is a moral weapon in the fight for justice. A relevant topic in 1930 as dialogues, such those shown in the debates, were the beginnings of what would evolve into the battle cry of the Civil Rights Movement about 20 years later. The prompt was given to students as a last minute change, and in preparation, they decide whether or not to include Gandhi’s method of satyagraha-

l think we should get into Gandhi’s concept of Satyagraha.
l don’t agree.
l don’t think people are gonna understand what–
what– Sadagara?
Sactchmaget? Sactchma–

Satyagraha. From the Sanskrit. Meaning truth and fairness.

It is very true that many people don’t. As a student of nonviolence myself, I still sometimes grapple with understanding the deep implications of satyagraha. Michael Nagler describes satyagraha as, “A positive and spiritually based form of resistance that starts in the heart of the resistor and inevitably produces creative action.”. It’s true that everyone’s truth differs-my truth may not necessarily align with someone else’s opinion of truth. Truth always finds its root in justice and integrity. A good litmus test to whether or not your truth aligns with the “truth” promoted in satyagraha is asking yourself if it’s concerned with upholding human dignity.

Satyagraha’s truth ties into another main theme of the film- the morality and justice of the law. St. Augustine was referenced several times in the film, most notably for his famous observation, “an unjust law is no law at all”. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. clarifies his inner truths drawn from Gandhi’s teachings of satyagraha and and contextualizes it using the classic political and spiritual philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas.

A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.

The debate scene between Harvard and Wiley address the “radical” implications the misconception of nonviolence carries. Nonviolence is sometimes misunderstood to be inherently anarchistic because civil disobedience involves picking and choosing which laws to obey and thus cannot be moral.

In rebuttal of the anarchistic argument, Wiley argued:

Gandhi believes one must always act with love and respect for one’s opponents,even if they are Harvard debaters. [laughter] Gandhi also believes that lawbreakers must accept the legal consequences for their actions. Does that sound like anarchy?

This examination is on point and simply put. Gandhi himself accepted jail-time many times as a part of participating in India’s independence movement. Laws are broken, not randomly, but with specific intent-chosen because they are inherently unjust and must be changed for the benefit all people. From this, participating in nonviolence is the greatest act of love and democratic participation for humankind that is possible.

1930 Wiley College Debate Team

Students from the debate team went on to actively participate in the Civil Rights Movement. James Farmer Jr. went on to found the Congress of Racial Equality and become a leader in the Civil Rights Movement.

Film critics claimed I would, “Stand up and cheer!”. And I did.

If you would like to learn more about the Wiley College Debate team, I suggest Brad Osbourne’s documentary The Real Great Debaters.