LAST WEEK, I attended a wonderful event at the Paramount Theater in Charlottesville, Virginia – An Evening with Harry Belafonte and Julian Bond. It was very special for me because I learned new things about the Civil Rights Era that I did not know before, and how much of a humanitarian giant Mr. Belafonte has been globally. And at one point during the forum, I had a sort of vision, and I want to share it here:

It was a vision for helping our young people trapped in violence, despair and gangs in our inner cities. I have written a talk-paper that offers the possibility of making more of a transition to a humanitarian-type approach to politics and foreign affairs, as opposed to our current one of narrow self-interest, coercion and force. With that in mind, why not go to the inner cities and recruit gang members and others, like the Bloods and the Crips, to participate in helping to alleviate hunger and thirst in, for example, the Horn of Africa. I know that people will say, “That’s crazy!” But why not? Go and tell them that we need them for something big—that we need their loyalty, their strength, their creativity, their energy, their hearts to help find solutions across the world for those who are dying and suffering. Tell them, “We need you!” How many times have they heard that, I wonder?

If the study of nonviolent movements worldwide has taught me anything, it has taught me the transformative power of the human heart, no matter how distorted that heart may have become, when the best within that heart is activated. Then just imagine these young people, transformed by their experiences, coming back to their communities and helping to transform their own worlds. There are some precedents that have done something similar… I am going to write a commentary piece about this soon.

*This is a revised version based on an OP-ED originally printed in the Staunton News Leader, January 15, 2007, and at the Huntington News Network, January 17, 2007.

*This essay is published at the Huntington News Network, and be accessed by clicking on http://www.huntingtonnews.net/18303  

THE FOUNDING FATHERS of America recognized a limited potential for good in man to be sure, but they were also haunted by what they believed to be man’s natural capacity to be selfish. Samuel Adams observed, for example, that the “passions of men” in power are “fixed and timeless.” Some of the Founders feared that even elected presidents might seek to satisfy their own interests above all else due to “avarice or ambition.” Thus, in creating the U.S. Constitution, they were so conscientious in diffusing power so that those in the government would not infringe on the rights of its citizens, that four years after its ratification they tacked on the Bill of Rights to further curtail what they believed to be the human capacity to dominate and abuse others using the resources of the state.

Yet their distrust of human nature extended far beyond those in power. They seem to have believed that human nature in general was driven by destructive passions. The masses, whom John Jay claimed were “neither wise nor good,” were not to be trusted anymore than the government, perhaps even less so. “[M]en are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious,” wrote Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers. Indeed, the Papers are full of harsh views regarding human nature, sometimes bordering on paranoia. “So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities,” believed James Madison, the Papers other chief author, it takes very little to “kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.” 

We are reminded here of the English political philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, who emphasized that the natural condition of man, in the absence of absolute authority, was to wage war on others. In one of his most unsympathetic critiques, he emphasized, “not only that all men are evil …but also evil by nature.” Hobbes’s pessimistic view of human nature influenced American political doctrine and the formation of the government, though his influence is sometimes little appreciated or understated. For the Founders, as well as Hobbes, government must take into account man’s nature as it is. This meant that rather than inspiring men to transcend their limitations, which they would not have considered since they believed these limitations to be inherent, the inevitable negative effects of “their Vanity, their Pride, their Resentment or Revenge,” in the judgment of John Adams (echoing Hobbes almost verbatim), must be mitigated and controlled as much as possible.

This did not mean, however, nurturing altruistic behavior in man. Instead, the Founders actually encouraged what they believed to be the human propensity to serve its own self-interest above all else, another powerful theme in Hobbes. “[P]eople are moved by interest and expediency, which presupposes divisiveness,” believed George Washington. Fearing that the concentration of men’s divisive “passions” could “invade the rights of other citizens,” the Founders thought that perhaps the proliferation of many diverse interests in society would keep one from becoming too powerful. In short, the Founders saw what they believed to be man’s selfishness diverted into as many outlets as possible, similar to the diffusion of power in the branches of the federal and state governments, as a way to control the most dangerous aspects of its effects and advance the welfare of society.

While the French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville agreed that American self-interest restrains the worst aspects of men, he also admitted that it was “agreeable to human weaknesses” because it rarely inspires them to identify with anything higher. By its very meaning, self-interest, which Tocqueville saw at the “root of all actions” in America, is a concern for the self, or me, or mine. This did not mean that people always acted out of concern for their own interests only, but within the context of American political thought it has been a very important theme that was encouraged from the beginning and subsequently shaped and defined our collective self-centered approach to world affairs.

Of course, collective or national self-interest was nothing new to civilization in the early days of the American republic. Since times immemorial empires have pursued their own interests at the expense of others. The difference is that Americans over time elevated the doctrine of individual self-interest to the status of enlightened and perhaps even altruistic conduct, as Tocqueville had pointed out. During the early days of the American Republic, Benjamin Rush, among others, considered the pursuit of self-interest via commerce as a modern virtue. “Its effects were next to religion in humanizing mankind.” Most significantly, this belief in the righteousness of our own self-interest, backed by what people came to accept as divine favor in support of worldly activities, would be integrated at the collective level, where for the next two centuries it would be used to legitimize American power and abuse, first domestically, and then all over the globe. It was an easy transition to make as well: What is good for myself is good for America. What is good for America is good for the rest of the world. We have the right to pursue our own interests abroad because we are God’s chosen.

The origins of this thinking can be traced to the founding of the republic when the multiplicity of self-interests were encouraged to minimize what were perceived to be the worse effects of a selfish human nature. It was a bargain in some sense. Man was allowed to accrue capital, pursue power and do whatever else for his own benefit as long as he was a good citizen. This helped pave the way for the growth of innovative technologies and capitalism, improving the material conditions of humanity by leaps and bounds, but left unchallenged the perception of a flawed human nature. Ethically, despite all the Enlightenment talk of social affection, the Founders only inspired men to fulfill the bare essentials in their obligations to each other: don’t harm others (and this was mostly meant in a physical sense). Or to put it another way, you don’t have to be good to others as long as you don’t intentionally inflict harm.

The Founders thus integrated a fundamental distrust of human nature into the very fabric of the republic. Indeed, the creation of America, I would argue, can hardly be fully understood apart from this. This is admittedly a rather controversial statement to make. The popular imagination has been immeasurably impacted by the reverential treatment of freedom and individual rights from scholars and particularly politicians, and their veneration of our founding fathers in what sometimes amounts to hagiography (even their flaws, when admitted, are often sentimentally portrayed). Such glorification of our political heritage has deflected serious considerations of the then dominant belief in a self-centered human nature—in which “there was absolute agreement” among the Founders, according to historian Bernard Bailyn—and its sorely neglected influence on how America would treat other peoples and nations.

Of course, such a pessimistic view of human nature contrasts sharply with what has been considered the Founders universal appeal to humanity. But such a consideration, uneasy as it may be, is necessary to help unravel the inconsistencies between the humane ideas we claim to represent and our inhumane treatment of other people and the abuse of the environment, historically and today. It is important to keep in mind that the beliefs we hold about ourselves influence our actions. And if we believe we are inherently flawed, degraded or cutthroat, we will manifest in some form or another destructive behavior, regardless of the external ideas we accept respecting the dignity of the individual.

With this in mind, the founders relegated blacks, Native Americans and women to an inferior non-citizen and partial-person status based on racial prejudice and tradition—a dehumanization to be sure—but they keenly distrusted poor whites, the majority of citizens who happened to be economically disadvantaged, and disfranchised them by imposing a property requirement for voter eligibility until it gradually loosened to include all white males. Thus, people grew in their intellectual and innovative powers, inspired by unbridled self-interest that really became self-enrichment, but maintained their essential outlook in a degraded human nature. It is no surprise that what occurred as time went on was people not acting altruistically in any consistent manner, but instead using material creativity, especially corporate-industrial innovativeness and military technology, along with political power, to abuse other human beings and their environments, from the cotton gin to the atomic bomb, from American slavery to child labor to the wars and self-centered foreign policy of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Before we move on, one thing should be made clear. In no way should the above be interpreted as a critical judgment of the American Founding Fathers. In figuring out what to do about human nature as it applied to individuals and government, they were working within the worldview of their day.  Reigning in what they believed to be the natural impulses of man was probably the best they could have hoped for or have imagined (some did indeed hold higher aspirations in the pre- and immediate post-Revolutionary period). It was not only their philosophers and the biblical interpretation of man’s sinful nature that led them to look upon humanity with deep suspicion (and perhaps their aristocratic leanings), but also their minds were seared by the reckless wars and the abuse of power throughout history. Alexander Hamilton, for example, denounced fervently the republics of the past, from Sparta, Athens, Rome, and Carthage, to Venice and Holland, to Britain and France that, in their pursuit of wealth, power and glory, warred with their neighbors and created hardships and havoc for their own citizens.

We can hardly fault the Founders for bringing to bear all they knew and understood from their worldview upon the formation of the new republic. The amazing thing to keep in mind is that despite their deep reservations and concerns, haunted by the nightmares of the past and their suspicion of man, they still had the courage and vision to create a new government, unlike any that had before existed, based on freedom and equality, as imperfect as it may have been. And it was not so much that they erred in their negative assumptions about human nature either. They accepted it at face value, so to speak, unable to realize that the man’s selfishness, rather than being vigorously inherent to the fabric of his being, was more the result of nurturing, reinforcing and anticipating bad or evil behavior throughout the ages. “Treat people as if they are violent madmen long enough,” explained M. Scott Peck, “and sure enough, they will become violent madmen.” This applies no less to nations as to individuals, according to biologist Mary Clark. This gave human nature, whether in an individual or collective context, the illusion of being inherently distorted and it must have appeared to the Founders as essentially fixed, beyond transformation.

Such a view would continue long after the Founders passed from the scene however. At the dawn of the twentieth century, for example, Harvard philosopher George Santayana wrote: “Dig a little beneath the surface and you’ll find a ferocious, persistent, profoundly selfish man.” A few decades after that, Sigmund Freud echoed this belief in his ominous warning of man’s “primitive” nature lurking, a “savage beast” waiting to reemerge and violently overtake man’s more rational impulses. “[I]nstinctual passions,” maintained Freud, “are stronger than reasonable interests.” As the twentieth century advanced, the belief that “human motivation is ultimately egoistic, based purely on self-interest” officially received its fixed law status, similar to a universal law, when it became an underlying assumption first in psychology and then later in biology with the popular claim—not fact—that human selfishness was encoded in our genetic makeup.

With all considered, why did the Founders back in their day have such a bleak view of human nature? Why did it seem to them to be so intrinsic, something beyond transformation, that they felt they had no choice but to accommodate it? Interestingly enough, the answer may largely lie in the worldview that was emerging from the Scientific Revolution. The final essay (part 3 of 3) will offer a brief historical sketch that outlines the enormous influence of the first Scientific Revolution in shaping the emerging political and economic world in the West and America in particular during the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries. We will begin here with Machiavelli’s objectification of man in the fifteenth-century, the precursor for the lower conception of human nature that would emerge, as we will see, after the Scientific Revolution. This will hopefully give us a better understanding of how all of this fits into the larger worldview that took shape after the first Scientific Revolution and the founding and emergence of the American Republic.

From Descartes, Newton and others, the workings of the universe were being understood with mathematical certainty. And this inspired the Founders and the political philosophers before them to reduce human beings to some kind of formula that could predict how they would behave in the world, and from this they believed that they could derive human potential. Trying to awkwardly apply natural science to people, then, human beings were tragically reduced to and defined as creatures of self-interest above all else—the dominant, universal drive—a belief that soon shaped and was shaped by two of the most influential negative views of human beings that emerged in the latter eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which we will also sketch in the final essay: the emphasis on man’s sinful nature—“sinner in the hands of an angry God”—followed by the emergence of social Darwinism, which all together contributed to a distortion of human beings and the justification of their exploitation and abuse that would become the lifeblood of the forthcoming imperialism, colonialism and selfish foreign policies.

Note: this three part series of essays are inspired by the desire to understand the contradiction between the political and human values that we Americans cherish, such as freedom, equality, the importance and dignity of the individual, with our historical and contemporary destructive actions abroad that utterly disregard these values. In this essay, we will attempt to show how this contradiction was established early on, as the Founding Fathers integrated a fundamental distrust of human nature into the very fabric of the republic.

Whether mankind will consciously follow the law of love, I do not know. But that need not perturb us. The law will work, just as the law of gravitation will work whether we accept it or no. And just as a scientist will work wonders out of various applications of the laws of nature, even so a man who applies the law of love with scientific precision can work greater  wonders. 

                                                                              ~Gandhi

According to CARE, “more that 13.3 million people—greater than the combined populations of New York City and Los Angeles—are desperately in need of immediate assistance due to the food crisis in the Horn of Africa (http://mycare.org). ” Sadly, the peoples living in this region always experience water and food shortages, and as a result they face severe constraints on their ability to grow food and maintain livestock as well as access to a safe water supply for drinking. This most recent famine is simply a deadly intensification of an already challenging situation that Eastern Africans live with daily.

The terrible suffering in that part of the world is all so unnecessary. We undoubtedly have many potential answers right at our fingertips for finding a long-term solution to Eastern Africa’s desperate water and food needs: desalination, renewable energy, rainwater harvesting, improved irrigation methods and better management of water resources, not to mention the financial, creative and human resources to make it happen. We also have unorthodox yet empirically sound approaches for alleviating the ongoing humanitarian crisis in that part of the world such as prayer and meditation for crops, rains, and conflict resolution. For a comprehensive and holistic overview that highlights these potential solutions, conventional and unconventional, bringing them together for perhaps the first time, please click on the above Article Appendix 2 icon located at the top of the web page, or go to http://goldenruleforeignpolicy.com/?page_id=1291, and read Bringing Water (and Food) to Eastern Africa: A Comprehensive Proposal of Hope. (This proposal was written and submitted globally in 2009, but since then the numbers of those suffering from famine has increased by more than thirty percent. We can and should act now—creatively, boldy, and compassionately). 

I hope to inspire you to do whatever you can to create awareness that we have it in our power to finally bring an end to the intense suffering of so many men, women, children and infants, and I pray that those with the resources, influence, compassion and expertise will explore, integrate, revise and expand upon what is presented in this proposal to help bring hope to the suffering and dying.

As a young boy I had had violent tendencies; the hot blood of the (Muslim) Pathans was in my veins. But in jail I had nothing to do but read the Koran. I read about the Prophet Mohammed in Mecca, about his patience, his sufferings, his dedication. I had read it all before, as a child, but now I read it in the light of what I was hearing all around me about Gandhi’s struggle against the British …When I finally met Gandhi, I learned all about his ideas of nonviolence …They changed my life forever.                        

                ~Abdul Ghaffar Khan (the Frontier Gandhi), Nonviolent Soldier of Islam (141)

Terrorism is often the only means of communication when all other avenues of human expression have been utterly and often violently denied. It is the language of the silenced and marginalized and dehumanized. It is the deep yearning of the suffering and misunderstood to be recognized and acknowledged by a global humanity that has closed its eyes, ears and hearts to their humanity. Perhaps it may be best understood as an extra-diplomatic form of communication in which silenced groups and peoples, oppressed and mistreated, and refused access to traditional means of communication, scream their desperation to us through the language of extreme violence. Will we ever try to compassionately understand and interpret the real meaning of this language?

HAVING STUDIED NONVIOLENT movements worldwide for well over ten years, I have been brought wonderfully in touch with the beautiful aspects, or what I like to call the jewels, of many religious-spiritual traditions. Almost all of the nonviolent campaigns that have been carried out across the globe against heavily armed regimes or forces have been religious-based movements, most of which nurtured and integrated from their own spiritual-values the universal truths of love, compassion and peace.

Thus, when the opportunity came along to help organize our local 2011 International Day of Prayer for Peace, I was thrilled. It appears that in the past the local IDPP has been primarily confined within one or two Christian churches. I thought that perhaps this year we could make it a community-wide event and, in the spirit of the interfaith purpose of IDPP, we could invite people from several of our rich spiritual traditions living right here in our own diverse community to attend and participate.  This could be a day, I imagined, to both focus on peace and healing for areas of the world suffering from violence, and a day to celebrate and honor our spiritual traditions. And when I brought up the idea to my pastor from the Staunton Church of the Brethren, Scott Duffey (along with other members of our Brethren peace committee), it was as if he had been reading my mind, and has since contributed his leadership, vision and inspiration in putting together our local IDPP community-wide event.  

In addition to the great performer-participants listed here on the flyer, our local IDPP will include eight people representing eight different spiritual traditions who will guide us in silent prayer-meditations for peace and healing for those suffering from violence, and for those contributing to violence and suffering. I truly wish we had time to include more spiritual guides, and I invite folks from all spiritual traditions and practices to please feel welcome and deeply valued as audience participants. I hope that we can set a precedent for IDPP here in our community this year, and perhaps make it bigger and more creative next year, accommodating more spiritual guides.

We also welcome with open arms and hearts all non-religious folks, and we hope that people of different worldview orientations will join us. I do understand that many of us have our differences, which sometimes prevents us from coming together in in dialogue not to mention friendship and community. But my prayer is that on September 21 we can lay aside the things that seperate us and focus together for peace and healing for men, women, children and infants who lack the peace and security that so many of us enjoy.  

Let me end here by saying that our collective prayer-meditation, even here in our own small community, could potentially be more than just symbolic. It could radiate globally. There is documented scientific evidence which seems to reveal an inherent power within our thoughts and feelings, or what is sometimes referred to as the power of human consciousness. During the past thirty years, there have been fifty groundbreaking experiments in which groups have used meditation—or focused intention—to create more peace, coherence and stability in high conflict and chaotic situations. They began by creating a deep sense of peace, harmony and coherence within themselves individually and as a group, and then radiated from that peaceful state “a powerful influence of peace and positivity” into troubled areas. Without ever taking physical action, at least not in the traditional sense, these groups achieved the miraculous by significantly reducing violent crime, warfare and terrorism, while increasing peace, harmony and cooperation (see the below essay, Protest Without Protest, and the book, Permanent Peace).

While the number of these groups were much larger than those of us that will be focusing together here in Staunton during IDPP, our local group will be part of and contribute to the collective focus of millions and perhaps billions of people worldwide praying and meditating lovingly that day for the peace and healing of troubled areas and hearts. With such a compassionate energy radiating across the globe, and with the loving assistance of the divine, we may very well be able to assist in creating peaceful transformation and helping others live more qualitative existences.

Staunton area interfaith World Day of Peace is sponsored by the Staunton (VA) Church of the Brethren. We wish to offer special thanks to Dr. Gary Race, Director, Mahatma Gandhi Center for Global Nonviolence, James Madison University, and Dr. Lise Keiter, Chair, Associate Professor of Music, Mary Baldwin College.

THERE MAY be another approach to engaging in nonviolent political struggle and activism, one that both integrates and transcends traditional nonviolence. This approach could perhaps be one of the most effective ways to begin a nonviolent political campaign, potentially pre-paving its success, and it begins with taking no physical action. One could even describe this technique as protesting without protesting, at least not protesting in the traditional sense.

There are at least three parts to this non-physical approach to political transformation. First, reformers and freedom-seekers must be willing to release methods of traditional conflict, and instead embrace nonviolence. This means not only rejecting conventional military weapons and approaches in favor of creative nonviolence, but also transforming the language of struggle and confrontation. For example, notice above that I use freedom-seekers instead of freedom-fighters. If we embrace nonviolence, but yet maintain the language of violence, we will be setting ourselves up for resistance from the opposition that could create unnecessary suffering, and weaken and distort our own intrinsic power—the power of the heart and mind. Words have power. They carry with them a profound meaning for us, particularly when they have been used in a very specific way for eons. I will talk a little more about this in a moment.

On a more obvious level, a commitment to nonviolence is important because it reduces the loss of precious human life, and lessens environmental destruction. The history of nonviolent movements compared with conventional war has demonstrated the truth of this over and over. And not only has life been saved and environmental integrity preserved through nonviolent confrontation, but most nonviolent movements have been wonderfully successful in achieving their goals, even against heavily armed forces and regimes.

In contrast, violent struggle, even in pursuit of noble goals, almost always plants the seeds for more problems once the goal of freedom, self-determination, etc. has been destructively achieved. In other words, violence in some form is transferred to the new order, as we have seen repeatedly throughout history, manifesting both overtly and subtlety. “Violent means will give violent ends,” stressed Gandhi. “There is no wall of separation between means and ends.”

With a basic commitment to nonviolence in place, I want to propose an approach that both integrates and transcends traditional nonviolence (what an exciting place to be at this moment in history, where we have established nonviolence enough that we can refer to it as traditional nonviolence!). The second part to this non-physical approach to political transformation is, then, to re-conceptualize our relationship to our enemies, whether autocratic-dictatorial regime elites and/or oppressive forces-occupiers, or, perhaps less dramatic, to how we think and feel about the opposition in any kind of political and social activism.

Let me step away for a moment to leap forward. The reader may realize at this point that what I am getting at here is that our thoughts, feelings and perceptions are important to a nonviolent approach. Indeed, what I want to stress is that these are extraordinarily important, and it is within our consciousness where our true power lies—a power that can impact others and our environment without taking, or least before taking, any physical action.

The best of our spiritual traditions have encouraged us for ages to transform our relationship with our enemies. Christ, for example, asked those living under the heavy arm of Roman occupation to love their oppressive enemies. The great nonviolent leaders—Gandhi, Dr. King, Abdul Gaffar Khan, and many more—all tried to inculcate into their followers an empathetic respect if not love for their enemies. They seemed to have understood that genuinely changing one’s perceptions—thoughts and feelings—about an enemy from anger and hatred to compassion and understanding could release a profound power that could change everything, and achieve the miraculous. In other words, by changing themselves they could change their world, as indeed did millions of nonviolent participants all over the globe.

This interpretation of an inherent power within our thoughts and feelings, or what is sometimes referred to as the

Meditating for Peace

power of human consciousness, has been demonstrated in experiments and in recorded life experiences. During the past thirty years, there have been fifty groundbreaking experiments in which groups have used meditation—or focused intention—to create more peace, coherence and stability in high conflict and chaotic situations. They began by creating a deep sense of peace, harmony and coherence within themselves individually and as a group, and then radiated from that peaceful state “a powerful influence of peace and positivity” into troubled areas. Without ever taking physical action, at least in the traditional sense, these groups achieved the miraculous by significantly reducing violent crime, warfare and terrorism, while increasing peace, harmony and cooperation.

The Harvard sociologist, Pitirim Sorokin, documented numerous instances of individuals and groups that transformed or changed their perceptions of potentially dangerous and violent situations, people and environments, and by doing so they were able to create positive outcomes. The evidence he offered ranged from defusing or changing the direction of violent intentions, to bringing together warring civil factions, to utterly transforming individual and collective aggression into cooperation and assistance. Sorokin concluded by saying that “the facts of love overpowering animosity …give a firm basis that unselfish love, true kindness and friendship have real power, and that this power is much greater than …individuals believe.”

I hope the reader can better understand that by re-conceptualizing enemies or opposition in a positive and compassionate way, by changing how they think and feel about them, they may be able to pre-pave, so to speak, the success of their nonviolent campaigns and activism. The humanity of the enemy, no matter how unjust they may be acting and how detested they may be, must first be restored. We must make sincere attempts to empathize with the opposition, putting ourselves in their shoes. Not only are they trapped in the age-old behavior of perpetuating or creating oppression and injustice, or maintaining the status quo, but the more threatened they feel, the more unlikely they are to release their hold on power and/or to accommodate reform. Resistance, verbal and physical, will simply create more resistance.

In the summer of 2009, following a deeply contested presidential election in Iran, for example, student protesters used the slogan, “Death to the dictator!” in regard to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and their desire to see him deposed. While this made for interesting drama, it did not lead to his ouster or to any of the democratic reforms in which the students so passionately advocated. Instead, President Ahmadinejad seemed more determined than ever to tighten his grip on power, which he has maintained to this day. By contrast, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights activists of the early-1960s often engaged their opposition with very public declarations of love, friendship and brotherhood, sometimes chanting in unison a declaration of love for a racist enemy who was in earshot of their chants. And, of course, we know how they helped to utterly transform the American South from a deeply segregated society into a more inclusive and democratized one.

Getting back to the importance of transforming the language of confrontation and struggle, words evoke powerful emotions that can influence and distort our perceptions. If we adhere to nonviolence in practice, but retain the language of violence, we are creating disunity and division within ourselves, which is transferred to our movement or goals, thus diminishing our power and effectiveness. We are a house divided. As the peace experiments seem to demonstrate, our emotions, our feelings, are extraordinarily powerful. Indeed, these experiments reveal that our true intrinsic power is miraculously released when we create a deep sense of peace and harmony within our thoughts and feelings—so powerful that from this state we can positively impact and influence environments and people non-physically. On the other hand, they can also keep us trapped in the narrow confines of judgment and anger, thus draining us of power and creativity and setting us up for resistance.

With that said, even struggle and enemy should be replaced with something more positive and empowering. Struggle presupposes something that we have to fight, or push and pull against. But in protesting without protesting, we are consciously and lovingly releasing as much resistance as possible, allowing our goals and objectives, through visualization and meditation, to harmoniously and gently fall into place, as did those who meditated for peace. Perhaps struggle could be replaced with movement (which is often used), an active and flowing approach to transformative change.

And enemy should definitely be replaced, since it is one of the most negatively charged words in any human vernacular. It generally evokes strong emotions of someone that we are passionately against and who is against us, and that we have to overcome, or defeat, or even destroy. But we should go as far as to make our enemy, in the words of the Dalai Lama, “the object of our affection.” Our enemy is a troubled soul, needing our understanding and forgiveness. He or she is a beloved son or daughter, brother or sister, father or mother. They were once a child full of play and dreams. Understand, however, that loving our enemy is not only or even mostly for the enemy. Rather, it is the process that sets us free, that releases our deepest inner resources for creating the larger transformation that we desire with as little resistance as possible. Maybe we could refer to the enemy as a friend, or potential colleague in our quest for change and a better world, and eventually see them as reflections of ourselves.

I like the way metaphysical teacher Louis Hay stresses to her readers that “in each and everyone of us is every single quality.” She writes, “While we may not choose to do so, we are all capable of being a Hitler or Mother Teresa.” Hay teaches quite simply yet profoundly that “if there is someone …who bothers you, bless them with love every time you think of them …If you see only the good qualities in this person, then that is what he or she has to show you…”

The third part of this non-physical approach to political transformation is probably obvious to the reader by now. I hope that I have begun to make the case that when we change our thoughts and feelings, when we activate and nurture the best within ourselves such as love, compassion and peace, we can create transformative change in the world without taking any traditional physical action. We are the power!

Gandhi understood the potential of this inherent power that we all have when he wrote, “There is a state in life when a man does not need …to proclaim his thoughts, much less to show them by outward action. Mere thoughts act. They attain that power. Then it can be said of him that his seeming inaction constitutes his action…” The theologian Thomas Merton also refers to “that unity which is at the same time the highest action and the purest rest…” Indeed, using only our focused minds and hearts we can pre-pave the path to our goals and objectives without ever leaving our living rooms, conference halls, etc. There may be no need to take to the streets, or it there is, it will come from a more profound level of inner transformation that can envelop the armed opposition, or potential colleagues, in a human radiance of love, calm and compassion.

Thus, those who are committed to nonviolence should take the time to release negativity as much as possible, to find ways to creatively empathize with the opposition, and to bring their hearts in alignment with the positive change that they want to create. We should then collectively—in unison and harmoniously—meditate, pray and visualize for the success of our objectives, thus imaginatively and compassionately extending ourselves non-physically into the areas or onto the person(s) in which we desire transformation. As unorthodox as it sounds, the most effective action may be to take no action, except with our hearts and consciousness, where, as we have seen, intentional miracles have been created. 

1 Louis Fischer, ed., The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work and Ideas (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 199, 312-13.

2 Robert M. Oates, Permanent Peace: How to Stop Terrorism and War Now and Forever (Fairfield, IA: Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy, 2002), 3-5, 12, 22.   

3 Pitirim Sorokin, The Ways and Power of Love: Types, Factors and Techniques of Moral Transformation (Philadelphia, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2002), 46-58.  

4 Louise Hay, You Can Heal Your Life (Carlsbad, CA: Hay House Inc., 2008), 106-07.

WHEN MY friend Joe invited me to go see and hear the Dalai Lama in Washington, D.C., I was ecstatic. It just so happened that I was reading a book called The Dalai Lama at Harvard, which consists of a series of lectures he gave on the “Buddhist Path to Peace” at the university in 1981. Like so many others worldwide, I have long admired his message, indeed his song of universal compassion. I have always felt a deep sense of gratitude that we are so blessed at this time in our history to have such a prominent yet humble voice speaking the power of peace and kindness to a world that is often enmeshed in chaos and conflict.

The Dalai Lama has inspired me over the last few years with his daily prayer that has become my daily prayer. It goes something like this: “I pray that everything I do today in thoughts, words and actions will be of positive benefit to others.” And I often pray that I may be blessed with what one of his close admirers described as his “rare gift of speaking directly to the human heart and evoking a compassionate response.”     

It is poignant that this compassionate, soft-spoken man turned international spokesman for peace emerged from the isolated country of Tibet, hidden from the world for centuries by the majestic peaks of the Himalayas, and which most had never heard of before the Chinese invasion in 1949. Indeed, the global rise and popularity of this humble soul, exiled from his country but whose compassion has overtaken so much of the world, reminds me of the age-old prophecy that the meek shall inherit the earth.

The Dalai Lama is one of those rare and unanticipated lights that appear from time to time on the global stage, often during those confusing and tumultuous times when we have lost sight of ourselves, and always in defiance of our worldview, to help guide us back to the highest aspects that lie within the human heart, such as love, compassion, joy and peace. He reminds us that these are the practical keys to being more fully human, and that all we have to do is to turn them on, to activate them and nourish them within ourselves—focus on them the way we would on anything else in our lives, but even more so—and that by doing so we would be one step closer to creating a world that is more peaceful and naturally responsive to the needs of sentient beings.     

The Dalai Lama spoke that Saturday on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol, highlighting a ten day event billed as “the largest gathering for world peace in history.” Joe and I got there more than three hours before the event, around 7am, to get a good seat, and we plopped down in the grass at the edge of a crowd of about two hundred other early-birds, and fifty or so yards from the makeshift stage (Joe, by the way, is one of the most gentle souls I have ever known, so was perfect to be there with him). Above that stage hung a huge banner that read, “The Dalai Lama on World Peace,” and all around us buzzed volunteers who passed out water, answered questions, and gave directions to the port-a-potties.  

As we waited, people flooded into the capitol grounds. I kept thinking how happy they looked, and how they seemed to represent every part of the world. A group of joyful young women that appeared to be Tibetan sat down in front of us. I felt such a collective energy of joy and peace in this crowd which gradually grew into the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands. And as it grew, so did the warm, harmonious collective energy that emanated from their hearts. Despite the rising temperature and hard ground, along with the cramped and sweating bodies, everyone seemed to be very aware of each other throughout the event, smiling, nodding, talking and laughing.

We were so grateful that Washington was not quite as hot and humid as it could have been for July, and that we had a nice breeze for most of the morning. It also helped that generous volunteers, who seemed to almost float through the crowds of people sitting on the ground, handed out bottles of water with what seemed like a sense of purpose and mission. You could tell that they genuinely cared about the people in the dense crowd, and were aware of those struggling with the heat. 

Finally the event began, and we were happily shocked to see the host walk out on stage—Whoopi Goldberg! I looked atJoe and exclaimed, “I didn’t know Whoopi would be here! Yeah! Whoopi Goldberg!” While at first consideration it seemed a bit awkward to see her there, Whoopi, in my opinion, was a great choice to welcome the Dalai Lama. His message of peace and compassion comes from a joyful, happy heart, and Whoopi brought to this event her usual sense of humor and a deep love of peace. Also, I think that the way she often uses humor and sarcasm to challenge distortion and fear-baiting in the media could be seen as a creative nonviolent technique, consistent with the Dalai Lama’s teaching and life of nonviolence. Plus, Whoopi is one of the most famous celebrities in the world, and having her there gave the event a certain pizzazz. (You know Whoopi—the woman has an electric charisma about her!) Perhaps most importantly, I believe that her striking presence there was a reminder that we can get closer to inner peace by not taking ourselves so seriously, by not clinging so tightly to our views and perceptions of ourselves. 

Sometime prior to the Dalai Lama’s talk, we were greeted by another surprise: the Archbishop Desmond Tutu who was telecast on a big screen set up near the stage. I want to briefly paraphrase what the Archbishop said, as I think it was one of the most touching and important things I heard that entire morning. He reminded us that while he and the Dalai Lama are honored that we have allowed them to be a voice for peace and understanding in the world, they were inevitably getting old and ready to retire. The Archbishop described his future, his dream, softly but with anticipation, where he saw himself sitting on his porch with the Dalai Lama, telling stories to children gathered around them (I saw a few tears in Joe’s eyes; I was wearing sunglasses). He then passed the torch, stressing that it was now up to us, all of us, to achieve a more peaceful and compassionate world. The Archbishop declared that we are to be the Desmond Tutus and Dalai Lamas in the world. Indeed, I thought, it is up to us, and I am thankful that we have the shoulders of these giants to stand on.

Then the moment that everyone was waiting for was at hand. Tenzin Gyatzo, the man known as the Dalai Lama, who was born in a small farming village in a remote region of a remote country, made his way onto the stage of this omnipresent global center of power. It was hard to make out the details of his face from fifty yards away, but the big screen showed him close-up. He had those famous eyes that always seem to be smiling, and lips that appeared slightly pursed together, expressing the subtle smile of a diffident child. I mostly kept staring at the real-life figure standing on the stage in his crimson robe however, thrilled that I was seeing him in person, no matter how distant. Besides, I had seen the Dalai Lama enough in pictures and on television to know that his physical attributes seemed to transform into an inexpressible human form of peace, of compassion, of kindness, and that was what my senses were picking up as I listened on.

The Dalai Lama’s message that day was a familiar yet profound one. He stressed that “without inner peace it is not possible to have world peace” and that “unless we make an effort in this direction, a happier society will never come.” I wish I still had my copy of The Pocket Dalai Lama, which had a great selection of profound inner peace excerpts that I could include here. But I gave it away to a distinguished-looking gentleman from Sacramento, California after the Dalai Lama’s talk—I believe his name was Kevin—who was trudging along in the early afternoon heat, and whose eyes lit up when I showed him the little book. I just felt that it belonged to him.

However, I do have on-hand a copy of The Pocket Thomas Merton, who was a compassionate theologian, and who said something about inner peace, or the lack of, similar to the Dalai Lama. “A man who is not at peace with himself,” Merton explained, “necessarily projects his interior fighting into the society of those he lives with, and spreads a contagion of conflict all around him.”

I remember reading an excerpt a while back where the Dalai Lama explained how we so often look for external panaceas to a better world, especially political and technological ones, but neglect cultivating the most fundamental solution which lies within us—inner peace. This reminds me of what my wise friend Claude stressed recently, that inner peace is the first and most important step one can take toward creating a more peaceful world, and what my dear friend Kay shared with me from a book she has been working on, where she writes, “So the means to a peaceful world may need to come from the individuals as we work on ourselves person-by-person, each bringing more love and compassion into their own world by allowing their heart a greater role in their life.”

I am also reminded here of what quantum physicist and sage David Bohm, who had been a colleague of Einstein’s, repeated throughout his life: “A change of meaning is necessary to change this world politically and economically and socially. But that change must begin with the individual; it must change him…” Bohm believed that a qualitative shift toward a peace oriented worldview would occur if people, rather than looking at the world in fragment and division, would instead begin to understand ”everything” as existing “coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken and without a border,” which he maintained was the way life operated from its deepest core to physical reality, and which parallels Buddhist teachings.    

There was also something symbolic about the Dalai Lama stressing inner peace as he faced the U.S. Capitol, the center of global power in a city and culture where the methods of aggressive political combat, rather than the tools of inner peace, are valued and practiced, and where decisions are made to spend a trillion dollars annually on military and defense. But perhaps the fact that this great man of peace stood on our sacred battleground with a different message, a different way of engaging each other through mutual respect and understanding, is a sign that times may be changing. He mentioned that people in power, in the U.S. Congress, had made it possible for him to speak there that day. Interesting, I thought. He also expressed his thanks to the city of Washington, the police, and others who bent over backwards to make his talk at the U.S. Capitol possible. Perhaps this is a bit too optimistic, but I believe one way of interpreting this is that traditional power welcomed this non-traditional man of peace, revealing, just maybe, an internal weariness with political war and a desire at some level to transform it.    

As the Dalai Lama talked on, my thoughts drifted for a minute or two to a peace march that I had participated in five days earlier in my hometown of Staunton, Virginia. It was our annual July 4^thparade held at Gypsy Hill Park, and my friend Connie, a committed grassroots peace activist, had invited me to march with members from our local peace coalition. When I arrived there all of the floats were waiting for the signal to begin the parade. They were stretched from one end of Thornrose Avenue to the other, a street that runs parallel to the park where we would be marching. Interestingly, the group-float behind us belonged to our local Tea Party. One of the members of the peace coalition wanted to have a picture of our peace banner taken side-by-side with the Tea Party sign. Feeling a little awkward, I went back to the Tea Party group, introduced myself to their leader, and asked if that would be O.K., half-expecting, I am ashamed to say, a snapping Sarah Palin-type response. But I was pleasantly surprised by her warmth and kindness, as she shook my hand, smiled, and answered, “Of course you can.”

I then paid a little more attention to the Tea Party people behind us, observing them from time to time. They seemed very focused, happy and peaceful, and remained so throughout the parade route around the park. I was also happy to see that the hundreds of people spread out along the parade route were welcoming, or at least did not appear to be offended by the presence of a peace coalition in a patriotic parade. There were even a few veterans that nodded their heads in approval, and one, dressed in full military regalia, who walked up to us and expressed his thanks. Maybe times are changing.

Back in Washington, after the Dalai Lama talk, Joe and I decided to hoof it around Capitol Hill, and do a little sight seeing. We both agreed that the one thing we definitely wanted to see, in the spirit of the day, was the majestic statue of Mahatma Gandhi just northwest of Dupont Circle in front of the Indian Embassy. When we got there, we were still buzzing from the high of the Dalai Lama, and seeing Gandhi was icing on the cake of peace and nonviolence. If you have never seen it, the statue is an impressive nine feet tall, standing atop a three foot rock and made of bronze. And all around the statue are words engraved in marble that offer a little bio about Gandhi, some of his quotes, and what was most interesting to me—other peacemakers that were inspired by Gandhi. One of those names engraved in marble was, of course, the Dalai Lama.  

Now sitting here at my computer I realize that these peacemakers have nonviolently invaded our political capitol, perhaps our collective consciousness, challenging us to re-conceptualize ourselves based on our highest attributes, and to transform our political and global behavior. Gandhi walks down Embassy Row daily holding his walking stick, boldly symbolizing peace and nonviolence in a city that has seen too much bitterness and struggle, historically and today. And the Dalai Lama flowed directly to the steps of our national capitol like a gentle ocean wave, perhaps cleansing us of our foolish pride, reminding us that there is a greater power than the external one we put so much stock in, which is the power of the heart, and that when it is activated things become a lot less complicated.

Finally, I don’t want to forget to mention the appearance that day of Skylar Grey, a singer-song writer who wrote a song for the Dalai Lama titled, “I’m Coming Home,” and who sang it for him that day before his talk. It is a beautiful melody that imagines the Dalai Lama coming home one day to a free Tibet. Sometime after Skylar performed her song, Whoopi asked the Dalai Lama if he believed the he would come home to Tibet one day, to which he responded, “Yes, I have no doubt.”

If I could say one thing to this 76-year old great leader of peace, it would be this: Your Holiness, our family member, our friend, you are already home. The world is your home, as well as our hearts, and there is always a place for you here. Welcome home. We love you.

*This essay is also published online at ekurd.net, a great source for news and commentary in the Middle East.

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What makes injustices so unacceptable in our time is the fact that we now possess the know how to feed the world and provide basics for all its citizens. What is lacking is the will and the way. What is lacking is compassion.

              -Matthew Fox, Domincan priest and  theologian, A Spirituality Named  Compassion, xii

AS IMPRESSIVE ARE THE EXPERIMENTS mentioned in Part 2, which beautifully transformed conflict and chaos through focused meditation, they seem to only confirm in a scientific fashion what the best in our religious traditions have stressed for eons: that is, by cultivating the highest aspects of ourselves, or by transforming our hearts, we can help transform our relationships and our world. And most religions—or ways of living, as most refer to their faiths—encourage us in some sense to continually stretch toward the divine in our thinking and actions.

When we examine our religions (and the teachings of those that articulated the highest aspects of our faiths) closely and with sensitivity, along with the courage to transcend traditional interpretations, it appears that love and compassion is more than simply an emotive response that manifests in some form or action, as amazing as that can be. Love and compassion are presented as a power or force that underlies our existence, something divine in origin and essence but wonderfully accessible to human beings—a power which we can profoundly activate with our hearts and minds.

And this power—this power is not something that we have to evolve into, at least not in the sense of some lengthy evolutionary process. The power of love is latent within us, right now. It lives in each of us, every person living on this planet at this moment, every person who has ever lived and every person who shall live. This is what every religion teaches us at its best. The power of love within us only awaits for our recognition, our surrender to it and our activation to emerge and unfold at anytime, and it will guide us to create a better world.

A pastor recently told me that living Jesus’ teaching to love our enemies, or to love universally, was not possible for imperfect mortals (a sentiment which I have heard and read too many times to count). He sighed, but felt that we would have to wait until we got to heaven to express such love. But Jesus taught the people of his time to be transformed by love in their time (as did the Buddha with compassion), not in some distant, evolutionary human future or heavenly sphere. He was not asking the deceased nor a futuristic utopian humanity to love divinely and uplift others, but everyday people walking the face of the Earth—the shepherds, farmers, merchants, soldiers and tax collectors—and his call, though profoundly distorted throughout the ages, has been the same for everyday people ever since.

Jesus understood that this kind of universal love could transform human relationships even in the most challenging situations and that those who received it and bestowed it upon others were emulating God. Indeed, he encouraged every person to stretch towards the divine—to be god-like—in their thoughts, actions and relationships that they “shall be perfect just as” their “Father in heaven is perfect.”¹ Norman Cousins understood this aspect of our divine heritage when he wrote that “the quest for perfectibility is not a presumption or a blasphemy but the highest manifestation of a great design.” And Leo Tolstoy believed  that “Christ’s teachings …guides people not through external rules, but through an inner consciousness of the possibility of reaching divine perfection.”² 

Perhaps most significantly, love appears to be here an underlying energy or power, something intrinsic to the universe, not only because we are told that God, the source of the universe, “is love,” but also that “love is what holds everything together.”³

The great Russian-born Harvard sociologist, Pitirim Sorokin, in his monumental study, The Ways and Power of Love—a book which drew criticisms from the austere, materialist academic establishment—believed that “love is …one of the highest forms of a unifying, integrating, harmonizing, creative energy or power,” and that “[w]ithout the operation of love energy …universal disorder and enmity would have reigned supreme.” Itzhak Bentov, a natural intuitive, wrote that, “What we call ‘love’ is an energy or radiation that pervades the whole cosmos. It is possibly the basis of what we know as the phenomenon of gravitation.”⁴

In Permanent Peace, Robert Oates explains the success of the meditative experiments mentioned in Part 2 by way of the ancient Vedic tradition of India, which maintains that underlying all existence is a unified field from which the world of objects arises, the validity of which is being revealed today through quantum physics, and that the human mind can create, shape and influence events. But could there be an underlying love energy that is at the basis of this field—perhaps the ultimate stuff of the universe—that the above meditative groups tapped into or used to non-physically create peace and harmony?

In Buddhism, people are encouraged to follow a path of compassion towards all people, living creatures and nature. “Fill your mind with compassion,” spoke Gautama Buddha twenty-five hundred years ago in India, who understood that as we cultivate compassionate thoughts we help create a compassionate world. Compassion, which is synonymous with love, may be a universal power or an energy that we can activate with our own minds and hearts. Guan Ming, a contemporary Chinese Buddhist, believes that “compassion has an enormous energy field” and is “therefore is a kind of tremendous energy.”⁵

Dominican priest and theologian, Matthew Fox, begins his groundbreaking study on compassion by saying, “Compassion is the world’s richest energy source.” In Judaism, one of the names for God is Yahweh, meaning “Compassionate One,” and in the Hebrew Bible people are told to emulate God. Indeed, the Psalmist insists that “the compassion of the Jew should extend beyond the human race to the lowliest of God’s creatures.” Fox further writes that compassion “is humans’ becoming and recovering and remembering their divine origins as ‘images and likenesses’ of God.”⁶

While Mahatma Gandhi internalized several religious traditions, he was most influenced by Jainism, a branch of Hinduism. Jains are devoted to consciously practicing compassion toward all living beings as much as it is in their daily power to do so. The central Jain tenet is Ahimsa, which is translated as nonviolence or non-harming. This touched Gandhi at the core of his being so profoundly that it became his life passion. He believed that “underlying Ahimsa is the unity of all life,” and that one draws closest to God, or truth, by being actively compassionate towards even the “tiniest creature.”⁷

Gandhi always maintained that “love is the strongest force the world possesses and yet it is the humblest imaginable.” By striving toward and living Ahimsa—a power synonymous with love and compassion that he believed held everything together—this small, frail man helped sweep away the mountain of British colonialism, and this without so much as raising an arm against his opponent. Gandhi demonstrated in practice what is possible, I believe, by intensely accessing (and inspiring others to access) what seems to be a universal power or energy of love and compassion.⁸

Finally, like Gandhi, Abdul Ghaffar Khan drew on and recast the highest aspects of his Muslim faith to help transform his people and nonviolently oust the British from his land, the North West Frontier Province, which is present-day Pakistan-Afghanistan. “It is my inmost conviction,” Khan believed, “that Islam is amal, yakeen, muhabat—selfless service, faith and love.” Khan’s biographer, Eknath Easwaran, who had met and observed both Khan and Gandhi, explained that together these meant that spiritual laws underlie all life, and that human nature is such that it can access these laws, especially love, to transform relationships and human affairs. He concluded that the kind of love that was demonstrated by Khan, and his people the Muslim Pathans, who were once notoriously violent, was a “spiritual force …which can transform anger into love in action.”⁹

I hope that a few things are becoming clear for the reader. When we realize how wonderfully empowered we are, when we humbly but actively and joyfully accept our divine heritage as marvelous beings of love, we can literally create miracles in our personal and collective worlds. When we let go of our doubts and fears, and all of the negative noise that pulls us down and tells us we are something less that what we are, and recognize and trust and act on the highest aspects of ourselves, we can create a new vision of politics and global affairs that transcends the tiresome selfish politics that has dominated the global landscape for much of human history.

But to create a benign, altruistic foreign policy, to unlock or release the power that is right at our fingertips right now—the power we have right now!—for solving hunger and thirst and other global problems, we must begin to see ourselves as capable, powerful, loving and transcendent. When that awakening or transformation occurs within more and more of us, we can then take that into global affairs, and literally create miracles on the international stage that were once sworn to be impossible.

Thus, re-conceptualizing ourselves first is essential to re-creating, transforming and recasting power and politics. The old image of humanity has to give way to this new (though old), heightened and enlightened understanding, acceptance and internalization of who we are and what it means to be human. What I am essentially talking about here is making peace with both our human and divine essence, embracing it with our hearts, standing on our tiptoes, stretching out our arms, and reaching up to God with gratitude and reaching out to creation with love, and making that the starting point to approaching our world and global relationships.

Taking action—where do we begin?

While there is not enough space here to adequately explore the ways in which we can begin to take action in accordance with the above (we will explore this more in depth later at this Website—plus, this essay is way too long already!), there are a few things I would like to encourage all of us to chew on for now—and perhaps you have more ideas that you can share with us.

The first step has to begin, as stressed above, within ourselves. I won’t harp on this here since I have harped on it enough already, but without this step, efforts toward improving global affairs, and solutions to global problems, will be short-lived, partial or ineffectual. We will create and get more of the same old, same old. Without a transformation within ourselves, we will continue to fall into the trap that philosopher E.F. Schumacher warned us of in which “people go on ‘clamoring’ for solutions” but “become angry when they are told that the restoration of society must come from within and cannot come from without.”¹⁰ And as philosopher Eckart Tolle writes, when “there is no change on that inner level, no amount of action will make any difference. We would only re-create modified versions of the same world again and again…” The simplest formula for transforming the way we behave in the world, then, begins when an individual embarks of a path toward transforming his/herself from within and then takes some form of action in the world. As Peace Pilgrim stressed, “peace within ourselves is a step toward peace in our world,” and during her lifetime she walked 25,000 miles to emphasize her message (Steps Toward Inner Peace, non-copyrighted booklet).

Next, once we leave the old paradigm thinking, which will occur naturally when we revise the perception of ourselves, we should prepare for a flowering of approaches and solutions that have perhaps never occurred to us—an explosion of unbridled, magnificent creativity! This will come from an integration of the physical and non-physical/divine, heightened intuition and imagination, love and compassion, which the old rational framework cannot accommodate all that well. It is unlikely that the new ways will be all that similar to the old ways, though we may absorb and integrate the best of some of the old ways. “The conditions of the new order of life cannot be known by us,” Leo Tolstoy wrote, “because we have to create them by our own labors.”¹¹

Bringing us a little closer to the more familiar surface of things (I realize that the above paragraph is a little—or a lot—nebulous), we live in exciting times in which we have the amazing power of communications technology literally right at our fingertips. We can share these ideas from our home or by way of mobile computers, on twitter, etc. with each other and the world through blogs and forums of all kinds, and with leaders and the media. We—you, me and all of us—can also participate in discussions and forums in our communities and in other traditional forums. These can take place in person, through articles and by way of letters to the editor, where we can compassionately share and advocate a new vision of foreign policy and global affairs that seeks to bring in the best of ourselves to create the best approaches for uplifting others.

Finally—realizing here the necessity that we must really think outside of the box in order to get us to a place where we can release the profoundly blocked power, inner and outer, that we have at our disposal to make the world a better place—perhaps we can condition the global environment to be more receptive to the ideas expressed in this essay and at this Website. In the meditation experiments from Part 2, participants transformed highly chaotic and violent situations into ones that resonated with a sense of harmony and coherence. During the Lebanese War of 1983-84, for example, group participants focused on, among other things, creating cooperationamong the factions fighting each other in the war. Quantum physicist John Hagelin explains that “during the 93 days when assemblies (or “coherence-creating groups”) were sufficiently large for a predicted impact in Lebanon there was an estimated …66% mean increase in level of cooperation among antagonists.”¹²

What this assembly essentially did here was to help assist warring parties to be peacefully receptive and responsive to each other. And if a group assembly of 7,000 can significantly reduce terrorism worldwide, as highlighted in Part 2, then why couldn’t they be used to condition our global environment by focusing on helping our leaders, our media and our citizens to be more responsive and receptive to a positive transformation of our foreign policies and global relations where love and compassion for the welfare of all is taken seriously?

Brief conclusion to parts 1, 2 and 3 of Re-conceptualizing Power and Politics

While in no sense are the points that have been made in parts 1, 2 and 3 of this essay meant to be exhaustive or detailed—we will deal with them more at this Website later—I hope that a few things are now coming into focus for the reader.

First, we are limited or empowered by our beliefs and it is up to us as to what beliefs we choose.

Next, the limiting beliefs in corrupt power and a dangerous world have been reflected back to us by way of more corruption and more danger—we have gotten back what we have put out—and we have mistaken the negative results and consequences for a truism about human beings in general. But there has never really been such a thing as corrupt power and a bleak human nature; only beliefs and a narrative that claims to confirm them.

Third, historical and contemporary negative conceptions of power and politics are not something engraved in stone, but instead should be seen as fluid, dynamic and malleable. The political structures we have built up so far have for the most part relied on a lower conception of human beings. It is time to transform those structures with a higher conception of who we are and the magnificent potential that we have.

And lastly, it is imperative that we begin to bring the best of ourselves or the highest of our most cherished beliefs into our politics and foreign policy, rather than excluding them to the detriment of our world. Here we need to develop and gain confidence, the faith, in a positive conception of power, and of the highest potential that lies within ourselves, which can be used to creatively help humanity solve its most pressing problems, such as hunger, thirst, war, and environmental degradation. (To see footnotes, click on “Footnotes” icon at the top of the webpage)

Stalin, Roosevelt, Hitler and the Pope are flying on an airplane when the engines fail. The pilot cries desperately to the passengers, “We have to abandon the plane! We are going to crash! But we only have four parachutes for the five of us! One of us will not be able to jump.”

Stalin then jumps up and takes a parachute and yells, “I must save myself! I am the leader of the great Soviet Union!” And he jumps out.

Then Roosevelt gets up and says, “I got to go gentlemen because I am the President of the United States.” He takes the second parachute and jumps out while yelling back to the others, “Remember—the—only—thing—to—fear—is—fear—itself!”

Now only Hitler, the Pope and the pilot remain with only two parachutes. Hitler then grabs one of the parachutes and declares, “I am the conqueror of the world! The ruler of the universe! I must jump out! You all go to hell!”

With only the Pope and the pilot now left, the Pope says, “My son, you take the last parachute. I give myself to the hands of God. Good luck son.” To which the pilot responds, “No, father, don’t worry. We can both jump out. We have two parachutes. The ruler of the universe just jumped out with my lunch box.”

When I know that I will be confronted with a challenging person, or an angry group of people, before I even open my mouth I say a little prayer: “I value them more than I value my own views and beliefs.” And how could I not? After all, they are made purposefully in the wonderful likeness and image of God.

                                                                                                                                         -anonymous

NOTE: Below are some excerpts from an article I wrote which appeared in The Progressive Christian (Winter 2009), titled, “Is the U.S. Haunted by Its Nuclear Past? Dropping the atomic bomb crossed a moral threshold.” I am posting them here for the 65^th anniversary of the tragic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.           —admin (Nicholas Patler)

DR. TATSUICHIRO AKIZUKI, a Japanese doctor working in a Nagasaki hospital when the bomb exploded, and who had heroically worked to help the multitude of injured, later wrote, “About 3 percent of those who died were military personnel; 13 percent worked in war industries; 84 percent were ordinary people, mainly the elderly, women and girls, students and children.” These percentages are similar to those that were killed in Hiroshima as well.

When we consider the combined destruction from U.S. firebombing and atomic bombing of Japan, historian Edwin P. Hoyt writes that in five short months, from March 9 to August 15, 1945, “330,000 civilians were killed,; 476,000 civilians wounded; 6 million civilians displaced; and according to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, at least 2.51 million homes destroyed.”

…

We egregiously crossed a moral line during those final days of WWII by targeting “mainly the elderly, women and girls, students and children” rather than military targets. Indeed, the tons of firebombs that we dumped on sixty Japanese cities (and before this the two German cities of Hamburg and Dresden), followed by the two atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were used precisely and strategically to incinerate ordinary people and their homes in a storm of heat and fire.

…

What had been considered immoral and utterly reprehensible prior to the War had been vigorously transgressed with lightening speed and unfathomable power, so much so that by the beginning of the post-war era it was totally acceptable for U.S. elites to disregard or ignore potential civilian casualties in their policies and actions …This was (and is) most strikingly demonstrated by the number of wars in which the U.S. has been involved and the intensity of force used since the end of the Second World War. In these wars, from Korea to Iraq, we have literally dumped millions of tons of bombs and napalm on human beings, their homes and their communities…

…

The mass killing of civilians with atomic weapons as well as with firebombing is perhaps the most pivotal event in modern world history. It was not only the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons that changed the world. It was more significantly the willingness and premeditation of human beings to deliberately explode those bombs on other human beings—particularly women and children—that has profoundly impacted the future of the world. Every action and policy of violence, exploitation and domination on the part of the United States since then cannot be understood without first understanding this. Even 9/11 ultimately began in those early August days of 1945. We leapt across a moral divide back then, and we have continued to step further and further away from it with relative ease ever since.

The good news is that, with this historical perspective, we can begin to gain a clearer picture of where, when and how it all began. And, most importantly, we can see that we created this world by our own beliefs and actions—nothing was imposed upon us—and that we can create a better future based in empathy, altruism and love. The greatest lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then, is that we must creatively find solutions that transcend violence—political, social and environmental, even in the most challenging situations.

Like Gandhi in Hinduism and Martin Luther King, Jr. in Christianity, Badshah Kahn demonstrated conclusively that nonviolence – love in action – is in perfect harmony with a vigorous, resurgent Islam.

                                                                                -Eknath Easwaran, Nonviolent Soldier of Islam (p.188)

NOTE: This next essay (and the one that will follow in the “Appendix Section”) will take a look at the history of our negative global behavior, and attempt to show how our approach to global affairs was shaped. In doing so, I hope to inspire us to see that what we often take to be a fixed worldview, something outside of our own power (the way it is!), is nothing more than the creation or outcome of historical ideas, beliefs and events. And what I hope more than anything that you come away with is that the negative conditions arising from these were ultimately based on a negative or lower conception of ourselves, or a perception of human nature as fundamentally selfish, which we accepted, nurtured and integrated into our politics and behavior, even as we professed the rights of the individual.  And perhaps then we can gain the confidence, despite the seemingly fixed nature of our political institutions and behavior, that our politics, along with the assumptions about ourselves and others, were “made by human beings” and so “they can be changed by human beings,” in the words of psychologist William Eckhardt.

FOR WELL OVER A HUNDRED YEARS, United States foreign policy has contributed to death, suffering and instability all over the globe. We Americans don’t like to hear it—we want to believe that we are the good guys—but sadly it’s true. We have helped depose fourteen sovereign governments, often using reckless violence, beginning with Hawaii in 1893 and continuing with Iraq today; sponsored dictators all across Asia, the Middle East, Latin and Central America, Africa and Greece; and supplied brutal or genocidal regimes with credits, diplomacy, money, military weaponry, combat training and other assistance (or just turned the other way in the face of genocide because no perceived U.S. interests were at stake).

America is also the only nation to have attacked another country with nuclear weapons, deliberately unleashing atomic hell on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We napalmed the Vietnamese and Guatemalans; fired untold numbers of missiles at other lands, including over 200 unilateral strikes against modest and poverty stricken second and third world countries (we are still doing so in Afghanistan while threatening Iran); and have rained down tons of devastating bombs on millions of human beings, their homes and communities. In just six short months during 1973, for example, U.S. B-29 sortie raids dropped over 250,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia alone, a mostly agrarian country the size of Oklahoma.¹

The world’s greatest superpower has practically bombed into oblivion an impoverished Afghanistan—the same thing it did to Iraq in the first Gulf War, as well as Vietnam and Cambodia, poverty-stricken countries unfortunate enough to be caught in the crosshairs of unbridled American power. As this is being written, we are directly contributing to civil wars, tensions and internal strife in Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, the Koreas, Israel and Palestine. In some cases we have helped create these conflicts as well as fanned the flames of violence. Many of these peoples, sadly, live their lives in war zones, fearing that at any moment they may be killed or maimed. This is something unimaginable to the average American, many of whom view their country’s dangerous actions abroad through a murky prism of spreading democracy, ensuring freedom or combating enemies to protect us here at home.

During the past half century, the United States has expanded its military presence to practically every corner of the globe. This has included stationing thousands of heavily armed troops along the Arabian Peninsula, offending the religious sentiments, cultural traditions and sovereignty of the Muslim people living there, inspiring attacks such as 9-11. We have also spent enormous amounts of time and resources creating and building up institutions where power is closed and unaccountable, such as the CIA, FBI, NSA, DIA, and Pentagon, all non-democratic agencies nurturing with the greatest care behind closed doors our self-centered, destructive policies and actions against other peoples. The late Gore Vidal, the moral conscience of our age, stressed that each of these agencies was created and all of their clandestine actions were carried out “without the consent, much less the advice, of the American people.”²

The American government also spends billions of dollars annually on weapons and research, far eclipsing any other country in the world, including the combined totals for China, Russia, United Kingdom, Japan, France and Germany (and this does not include spending for the Afghan and Iraq wars). And we are the largest weapons exporter in the world, providing billions of dollars of weaponry and military assistance to countries, some of which have poor human rights records and use American military ingenuity to wreak terror on unwanted internal minorities. This includes Turkey, the third largest recipient of U.S. weaponry and military training in the world, which, until very recently, was committing the “slow-motion genocide of the Kurds” as U.S elites look on.³ 

The George W. Bush Administration took things to a dangerously new level in our world by recklessly pursuing its own interests in the international arena in opposition to world consensus, trampling international law and democratic norms, disregarding global arms and environmental agreements, violating moral inhibitions against torture and thumbing its nose at the concerns of other nations.

And while defense and military spending reached new heights during the Bush years, it has so far changed only for the worse in the Barack Obama Administration, where, sadly, it will soon reach more than a trillion dollars (based on President Obama’s 2011 federal discretionary budget sent to Congress in January 2010. See www.afsc.org). While Obama has expressed a willingness to work more closely and sensitively with the international community, which is a positive step forward, he has nonetheless inherited the entrenched military-industrial complex. And without dogged grassroots support from us, the best we can hope for from one man, no matter how visionary, is perhaps some moderate reductions in its power and influence (though, so far, not dollars), which could be easily reversed by a future administration that panders to fear for its lifeblood, as we have seen over and over.  (Lesson: the reform that we need today in politics and global affairs can only come about by a transformation in government as we know it. Human rights and serving the welfare of the vulnerable must move from the non-political periphery and become the soul of our government and foreign policy institutions.)

Perhaps the most disturbing thing for the world today, which we hear very little about, is that the U.S. has been developing and testing E-Bomb weaponry—an alarming new generation of weapons that uses electromagnetic and neurological technology to kill, maim, paralyze and control the mental and emotional states of human beings. Col. Doug Beason, a leading scientist in the development of this destructively oriented technology, and director of Threat Reduction at Los Alamos National Laboratory, expresses his enthusiasm for the future of warfare in which “directed energy weapons” allow us to strike “around the globe almost instantaneously,” based upon, once again, the misuse of science: “[I]n the next few years, when they are unleashed on the battlefield,

                                                         “they will be more revolutionary than the longbow, machine

                                                          gun, stealth airplane, cruise missile, nuclear submarine, or

                                                          atomic bomb … It will transform our way of life.”⁴

And, might I add—our way of death.

The motivations behind our global behavior: economic-resource, ideology and power

With all considered, how on earth did we, the United States of America, the great experiment in human liberty, get here? How could a supposed democracy act so undemocratic?

There is the obvious reason (but still rarely admitted or acknowledged openly in public discourse). The U.S. is an empire. That’s what empires do—they expand, dominate and conquer. They act unilaterally and take little heed of the concerns of their neighbors. They have done so since times immemorial. The ancient Greek historian, Thucydides, wrote that the Athenians initially increased their empire for defensive reasons, but then they found power over others intoxicating and justified their imperialism by passionately arguing the natural right of the stronger to selfishly dominate the weaker.⁵More than two thousand years later at the dawn of American empire expansion, foreign policy icon, George Kennan, wondered if America had not embarked on a similar course with its conquest of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba and the brutal takeover of the Philippines.

                                                    “…at the bottom of it all lay something deeper, something less

                                                    easy to express, probably the fact that the American people of

                                                    that day, or at least many of their more influential spokesman,

                                                    simply liked the smell of empire…”⁶

U.S. foreign policy has been largely motivated to project its power abroad by three main objectives, infused in practice, however, with many nuances: a desire to create or maintain access to global resources and markets; to spread its worldview and crush perceived (and often exaggerated or invented) ideological threats; and simply to maintain its image as the world’s privileged superpower. Sometimes it has been a coalescence or overlapping of two or three of these objectives—economic-resource, ideology and power—involved in the decision to deliberately violate or manipulate the sovereignty of another nation or people. American presidents also seem increasingly obsessed with their legacies—particularly since they now a days memorialize themselves in expensive, self-venerating monuments known as presidential libraries—that they are willing to senselessly sacrifice human lives and resources in hopes of reversing the downward spiral of their foreign policy fiascos such as in Vietnam and Iraq.

But in many cases the main tangible objective underlying our domination-oriented approach to world affairs has been and still is access to markets and resources, such as oil in the Middle East. This has been central to American history going back to at least the post World War I period, when the foundation of our petroleum foreign policy was built upon the murdered corpses and skeletons of human beings in the former Ottoman Empire.

In The Burning Tigris, Peter Balakian writes that as war waged across Europe, the Turkish nationalist government carried out a brutal campaign of terror and extermination against the Armenian minority living within its borders, where it is estimated that over one million people perished from massacres or starvation and disease as a result of forced deportations. He further explains that U.S. public opinion was outraged, determined to not only hold Turkey accountable for “crimes against humanity” in an international court of law, but also to help create a homeland for the Armenians. The leaders of the new Turkish Republic, however, cleverly dangled their oil fields in front of U.S elites, tempting them with the lure of money, power and global influence. To make a tragic story short, U.S. political and corporate leaders (and missionaries) scrambled to thwart any justice for the Armenians, even bowing before Turkish demands to mute any mention of “Armenia” in diplomatic talks. Soon thereafter, the U.S. had its foot snugly in the oilfields of the Middle East, along with other European powers. The suffering of the Armenians was swept under the rug and the Turkish government continued to commit atrocities against them as well as Greeks within their reach. Thus, the immoral aspect of our contemporary foreign policy, where materialism took precedence over humanity, emerged from the dark ashes of genocide, where material self-interest or the prospect of self-enrichment led the U.S. to shelter a genocidal government while at the same time helping to drown out the cries of its victims for justice.⁷

This would set a significant moral precedent for the rest of the century in which the thirst for global resources and power would take precedence over any genuine concern for the peoples living in the lands we coveted. We would repeat what we did in Turkey, ignoring suffering and putting human lives in terrible jeopardy to get what we wanted, in many other countries around the world: Iran, Iraq, Nicaragua, Chile, Guatemala, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia—not to mention Japan in World War II.

Humanity not only took a backseat to material and ideological interests however, for that would imply that at some level the aspirations, interests and lives of non-Americans were at least considered, even if secondary. The reality was that too often we demonstrated outright ambivalence to how our actions would negatively impact others, or we intentionally inflicted harm on peoples, their communities and countries. We treated non-Americans as a “bloodless set of abstractions,” in the words of a troubled Anthony Lake after he resigned in protest from the Nixon administration during the Vietnam Era.⁸ The end goal was almost always to serve U.S. and at times allied self-interest. Practically anything was acceptable as far as the means were concerned as long as we secured access to oil reserves; markets and dominance for U.S. multinational companies based in foreign lands; and puppet leaders and regimes that supported American political, economic and military power and objectives.

There are many excellent writers-thinkers who describe in detail and synthesize U.S. activities as it relates to the use of American power abroad, historically and today, and I strongly encourage you to read these if you not familiar with them already (they are referenced in this footnote).⁹ However, these works are primarily interested in exploring how this power is misused and they rightfully point out America’s shortcomings along with potential remedies. They focus on empire (or militarism and imperialism), resources, ideology and power as the forces behind our domination driven foreign policy. As valid as these are in understanding why the U.S. does what it does in the international arena, all of these are still only manifestations of something much deeper.

What really underlies our negative behavior in the world?

Why have we imposed our will on other people to get what we want no matter the costs to others? Why do we believe that it’s acceptable to deliberately create and escalate violence and brutal conflicts where thousands of human beings are destroyed and maimed for life? What really underlies our use of force, coercion and manipulation in world affairs? How could the world have gotten more violent, destructive and chaotic over the past hundred years—a period considered “the most catastrophically bloody century in history”—while at the same time human rights have become more accepted? Indeed, today we have thousands of organizations and treaties that enshrine and promote human rights, with members and adherents numbering in the millions. The main goal of the United Nations, for example, is to “reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person.” Why, then, have things gotten worse for much of humanity?

Because we still carry the same view of ourselves as we did before the democratic institutional or human oriented structural changes, before all of the human rights treaties and organizations. That is, at some level we still believe that human nature is hopelessly degraded, untrustworthy, unreliable and at worst evil, and that has been the premise from from which most governments operate. “The idea that we are inherently selfish but also that aggression and hostility are part of our basic human nature has dominated our culture for centuries,” writes Dr. Howard Cutler in The Art of Happiness, a book he co-authored with the Dali Lama. A high-profile televangelist, for example, recently stressed to his national audience that the human heart is “hopelessly wicked.” While no one would deny that change with respect to human rights has occurred on the outward level, the inward level has stayed the same, particularly with governments where most of the power resides and is used, or misused. And as philosopher Eckart Tolle writes, when “there is no change on that inner level, no amount of action will make any difference. We would only re-create modified versions of the same world again and again…” The acceptance of a selfish human nature has been an important part of an underlying worldview in the West and especially America that, ironically, we are often not fully aware or perhaps even deny. This can be explained in part because the belief in a degraded human nature which subtlety informs our worldview is often obscured by what biologist Mary Clark aptly describes as all of “ballyhoo in America about individual freedom and rights.”¹⁰ 

Even when it appears that we do not see ourselves as flawed, we all to easily perceive others that way. And the belief in our own material and ideological supremacy masks a diminished moral perception of ourselves: if we truly believed that we were intrinsically good we would not take advantage of others through force, manipulation and coercion, and support policies that cause them harm. Or to put it another way: if we believed that we were compassionate and empathetic above all else, placing supreme value on their cultivation and integration into our political affairs, it would be unlikely that we would engage in destructive behavior towards others. Our worldview would be more humanized and our policies and actions abroad would reflect that belief. Paradoxically, and most importantly for the next essay, this negative outlook of human nature influenced the earliest and perhaps most momentous charter and government based on human rights in history: the U.S. Constitution and the formation of America.

In the “Article Appendix” section, located at the top of the webpage, we will explore how eighteenth-century European political philosophy developed a lower conception of man based on the then emerging Scientific Revolution, and how this influenced the American Founding Fathers. Here I will attempt to show how science influenced politics to redefine and give rise to a mechanistic worldview that portrayed people as atomistic individuals who naturally pursued their calculated interests above all else, and how this, a carefully crafted version of selfish man, became something akin to universal law – an important cornerstone of the new American political order, helping to set the stage for our mistreatment of peoples abroad.

Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind. We love the land of our nativity only as we love all other lands. The interests, rights, liberties of American citizens are no more dear to us than are those of the whole human race. Hence, we can allow no appeal to patriotism, to revenge any national insult or injury.

                                                                                             -William Lloyd Garrison

There is nothing in this world human beings do not seek: they explore the mountains and the hills, aspire to know what is in the sea and beneath the sea, in the most remote deserts. However, there is one thing people neglect and do not seek: the divinity that is within them.

                                                                                                  Rabbi Zadok ha-Kohenof Lublin, 19th Century

WELL, ACTUALLY, this is not a step-by-step guide, as the title implies. In fact, we do not need an instructional manual for finding solutions to global problems such as hunger, thirst and disease. We already have the know-how and resources to “feed the world and provide the basics for all its citizens,” in the words of theologian Matthew Fox.  We are overflowing-or have the potential to be overflowing-with creativity, with compassion (though often latent and undernourished) and, of course, with resources—human and material. We know what needs to be done and how to do it. And if we don’t know how to do it, we undoubtedly have the ability to find a way.

If this is indeed true, why on earth aren’t we doing it?

Abraham Lincoln famously remarked on more than one occasion that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” He was referring here to the United States, of course, the deep divisions and profound distrust that then existed between the North and the South over slavery. Lincoln feared that if nothing was done to remedy the problem, the nation would be torn apart and the destiny of the American people as one family with a shared sense of purpose would instead be plagued with disputes, suspicion and dissension. The North would pull against the South; the South against the North; and the dream of an ever greater fulfillment of democracy would be buried under the dust of conflict. The full potential of the American people, Lincoln knew, would be greatly compromised and profoundly wasted.

So what does this have to do with solving global problems? We never hear it today, but in regards to human rights and alleviating the ills of the world, the U.S. is a house divided against itself, which means that we are unable to tap into our full creative potential that could prosper humanity on a level that would astound us.

We are a house divided because we proclaim individual rights here at home but we have often disregarded those rights abroad, as the previous essay, The Sad, Tragic Journey of U.S. Foreign Policy, makes all too clear. We claim to be the standard bearers of the most moral government in history, but our global behavior has often revealed a lack of moral commitment to the high principles that we claim to represent, both by our actions that cause harm and our inaction that withholds good.

We are a house divided against itself because we have poured enormous energy—brain power, heart power and money—into the development of weapons and technology designed to kill rather than pouring that same mind-boggling energy into creative solutions for prospering humanity—the same humanity that we claim through lip service should be free of the violence that our bombs wreak.

We are a house divided because we teach our children that human life is sacred, by way of our families, churches and schools, but then we pound it out of them so that they can kill our enemies.

We are a house divided against itself because we say we want peace in the Middle East while we wage war in Afghanistan, and Iraq, where we still have over 50,000 heavily armed “support” troops.

We are a house divided because we have more food than we can eat, much of which daily ends up in dumpsters behind our restaurants and grocery stores, when so much of our extended human family in Africa and other places has no food to nourish them or water to quench their thirst. Would this tragic waste occur if it were our own families or next door neighbors who were ribbed, emaciated and starving?

We are a house divided against itself because, although we claim to represent the most advanced political order to date, one in which the rights of humanity are paramount, we are still largely operating off of old political theories and negative assumptions about human nature that prevent us from creatively and imaginatively serving the pressing needs of humanity in our world today. Government, from before the Enlightenment, to the time of our Founding Fathers, and through today, has given us fixed notions of what political power is supposed to do and not do. One thing that has remained consistent for centuries is that government, including the U.S., takes care of its own, sort of, but stands ready to use its power to take advantage of the other, with little or no regard to their suffering.

I CAN ONLY SURMISE what Lincoln would think or do if he were alive today. However, just for fun, let’s imagine that Lincoln, who was a visionary for his time, would, if he were alive today, also be a visionary for our time.

The Lincoln of our day, I can imagine, would see all peoples as one family, similar to the way he viewed all Americans as one family in the mid-nineteenth century. He would understand that the U.S. of the twenty-first century has prospered like no other country in recorded history because of its bustling diversity, where all races, creeds and nations live under the same roof. He would, I believe, challenge the divisions, inconsistencies and waste that prevents this mirror of the world from reaching out with its full collective potential to work with and help its global neighbors.

Lincoln would understand that technology has made the world intimately close, and with it has brought the suffering of the world to our doorsteps. And he would feel with a sense of divine conviction that our material and human prosperity has given America a moral responsibility to genuinely and humbly help others. I can see the lanky Lincoln standing tall on a stage somewhere, or looking into a TV camera, his deep set eyes penetrating our souls, making Gandhi’s words his own as they emanate from the deepest core of his being. See his furrowed brow, the deep lines on his face, his sharp, angular nose, the beard on his chin. Listen closely, and hear him speak softly but with conviction: “There is no limit to extending our service to our neighbors across state-made frontiers. God never made those frontiers …I pray that we can live as much for other nations as for our own.”¹

With great sadness, Lincoln would mourn the genocide and the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, remembering the depression and darkness he felt everyday throughout those terrible years of the Civil War, the war that saddened his spirit and added so many years to his body, and know that organized killing is no longer the answer. Lincoln would become convinced that America has committed its greatest resources—human and material—to the preparation for war supposedly to prevent war, when it has done nothing but guarantee that war would be waged and enemies manufactured. He would help us to understand at a deeper level that when we focus on something, such as potential threats, enemies, and the like, we create more of what we are trying to avoid (or not avoid), and that there can never be peace until we think of peace more than war and then commit our greatest resources to the things that will make for peace.

While honoring his predecessors—Jefferson, Adams, Washington and the like—Lincoln would nevertheless shed old notions of the duties of government. He would see the profound limits of power politics and seek another way. I can imagine him inspiring us with the his sincerity and his uncommon wisdom to re-think power and government, taking us to a mountain top where he enables us to envision a government in which human rights and humanitarianism, rather than power politics, are the fundamental cornerstones. “Only when both our intentions and our actions are good,” he would stress, “will our freedom be safeguarded and our enemies become friends.”

Lincoln, I believe, may even call a national prime time press conference to share this vision with as many people as will listen and believe. Here is an excerpt from that speech and vision: “Today, I have once again found America as a house divided …We are a house divided against itself because…” And I think Lincoln would stress some version of the examples mentioned above. He would then continue, borrowing some of his words from the Bible, which he liked to quote in times of crisis:

                                          “We are above all else a house divided because we have thousands

                                             of organizations and millions of citizens working diligently to feed

                                             the hungry, to give water to the thirsty, medicine to the sick, clothes

                                             to the naked, homes to the homeless; we have so many who are

                                             committed to removing the chains of those who are chained unjustly,

                                             to freeing those who are abused.

                                             Yet, as we reach into the world to improve the lot of the suffering,

                                             our government so often moves, both by design and intention, in the

                                             opposite direction, seeking its own interest rather than a genuine

                                             concern for the interests of others. Because power politics is its

                                             guide, it reaches into the world with its might, with its bombs, with

                                             its threats, all without seeing the suffering of the vulnerable or

                                             hearing the cries of those who seek justice. Indeed, the U.S. govern-

                                             ment often adds to that suffering and drowns out those cries with

                                             its noisy military might and the deafness of its diplomatic machinery.

                                             So as millions work for the good of others, political power—which

                                             has most of the power—works for the good of itself.

                                             Let’s not be so quick to condemn the government however. It is simply

                                             adhering to the design, or template, that was created for it. A design

                                             that was fixed by its philosophers and engraved in stone like the

                                             Ten Commandments. “That’s the nature of power and that’s human

                                             nature—we cannot expect anything more,” they told us with a sense

                                             of divine finality. But the only thing that was final was that we

                                             stopped imagining a positive, benign conception of power and people.

                                             I stand before you to ask you to work with me to transform political

                                             power, to release old notions and beliefs, to believe that we can

                                             harmonize government with human rights and humanitarianism.

                                             The necessity of the suffering cries out for our courage and bold-

                                             ness, our compassion and creativity. The power of the state and the

                                             power of love must cease to be opposites, and innovatively blend

                                             their energies together in order to find solutions to global problems—

                                             solutions which have heretofore eluded us because we have been a

                                             house divided…”

After Lincoln finishes his speech, hands fly up all over the press corp audience. He points to one of the reporters who hastily asks, “What fundamental standard do you propose for this new type of political order?”

“Standard?” Lincoln repeats. His face grows intensely serious. He rubs his beard and nods his head and remembers those wise words from the second century Hebrew scholar, Ben Azzai. He then continues, “Universal love is the only possible standard for human relations.”²

And that, my friends, is the how-to guide for finding solutions to global problems.

GANDHI: “War with all its glorification of brute force is essentially a degrading thing. It demoralizes those who are trained for it. It brutalizes men of naturally gentle character. It outrages every beautiful cannon of morality. Its path of glory is foul with the passions of lust, and red with the blood of murder

…One who believes in violence will wish God “to save the King, scatter his enemies, frustrate their knavish tricks”—as in the British national anthem. If God is the Incarnation of Mercy, He is not likely to listen to such prayer but it cannot but affect the minds of those who sing it, and in times of war it simply kindles their hatred and anger…”

STEINBECK: “And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him, ‘Use it well, use it wisely.’ We put no checks on him. Go out and kill as many of a certain kind and classification of your brothers as you can. And we will reward you for it because it is a violation of your earthly training …They’ll first strip off your clothes, but they’ll go deeper than that. They’ll shuck off any little dignity you have—you’ll lose what you think of as your decent right to live and be let alone to live. They’ll make you live and eat and sleep and shit close to other men. And when they dress you up again you’ll not be able to tell yourself from the others.

          “After a while,” said Cyrus, “you’ll think no thought the others do not think. You’ll know no word the others can’t say. And you’ll do things because the others do them. You’ll feel the danger in any difference whatsoever—a danger to the whole crowd of like-thinking, like acting men.”

          “What if I don’t,” Adam demanded.

          “Yes,” said Cyrus, “sometimes that happens …(but) the whole machine devotes itself coldly to the destruction of his difference. They’ll beat your spirit and your nerves, your body and your mind, with iron rods until the dangerous difference goes out of you. And if you can’t finally give in, they’ll vomit you up and leave you stinking outside …It’s better to fall in with them.”

TOLSTOY: “Yes. They make men into a passive instrument for carrying out all the cruelties and brutalities needed by the government …removing from them all natural and human conditions of life, home, family and kindred …They shut them up together in barracks, dressed in special clothes, and work upon by cries, drums, music, and shining objects to go through certain daily actions invented for this purpose, and by this means are brought into an hypnotic condition in which they cease to be men and become mere senseless machines, submissive to the hypnotizer …These vigorous young men, hypnotized, armed with murderous weapons, always obedient to the governing authorities and ready for any act of violence at their command …and kill—he does it all submissively.”

GANDHI: “The moment a slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. He frees himself and shows the way to others. Freedom and slavery are mental states. Therefore, the first thing is to say to yourself: ‘I shall no longer accept the role of a slave. I shall not obey orders as such but shall disobey them when they are in conflict with my conscience.’

…I have had in my life many an opportunity of shooting my opponents and earning the crown of martyrdom but I had not the heart to shoot any of them. For I did not want them to shoot me, however much they disliked my methods. I wanted them to convince them of my error as I was trying to convince them of theirs. ‘Do unto others as you would want them to do unto you.’

…I own that I have am immovable faith in God and His goodness and the unconsummable passion for truth and love. But is that not what every person has latent within him? If we are to make progress, we must not repeat history but make new history …The highest moral law is that we should unremittingly work for the good of mankind.

…Shortly before my death, indeed just a few hours prior, I was asked how I would meet the atom bomb with nonviolence …I will come out in the open and let the pilot see I have not a trace of ill-will against him. The pilot will not see our faces from his great height, I know. But the longing in our heart—that he will not come to harm—would reach up to him and his eyes would be opened …Love is the strongest force the world possesses…”

STEINBECK: “They had a tool or weapon that is… nearly gone, or perhaps it is only dormant for a while …they trusted themselves and respected themselves as individuals, because they knew beyond doubt that they were valuable and potentially moral units—because of this they could give God their own courage and dignity and then receive it back. Such things have disappeared perhaps because men do not trust themselves any more, and when that happens there is nothing left except perhaps to find some strong sure man, even though he may be wrong, and to dangle from his coattails.”

TOLSTOY: “Instead of every man directing his energies to freeing himself, to transforming his conception of life, people seek for an external… method of gaining freedom, and continue to tighten their chains faster and faster …What people need most of all is to develop their own conscience, to clarify it to themselves and then live in accord with it.

…I believe that man’s true good lies in following the will of God, and that God’s will is for people to love one another and so do unto others as they wish them to do unto them …I believe that the meaning of every man’s life lies only in increasing the store of love within him; that this increase of love leads people to greater and greater blessings in their lives.

…[T]rue merit and dignity is to be found in serving one’s neighbor, not in exploiting him …and (in working for the) establishment of the greatest possible union between all living beings …The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity …One need only love—and what one loves becomes splendid.”

*The quotations used in this piece come from Louis Fischer, ed., The Essential Gandhi (New York: Vintage Books, 1983); John Steinbeck, East of Eden (New York: Bantum Books, 1974); and Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You (Radford, VA: Wilder Publications, LLC, 2008) and A.N. Wilson, ed., The Lion and the Honeycomb: The Religious Writings of Tolstoy (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987).

I AM WRITING THIS ESSAY with some reluctance, and consequently I have decided to withhold publishing it until at least a week after the ninth anniversary of 9/11, which is today. The last thing I wanted to do was to tread on what so many Americans consider sacred ground, or do anything that could be interpreted as insensitivity towards those whose lives were lost on that unforgettable day. My heart and prayers go out to all of them, their families and loved ones. Truly.

Now it is more than a week later. I am still hesitant. But I have to speak my truth here, because I sincerely believe that by memorializing the dead with so much emotion and ceremony, we are repressing the past. And by repressing the past, which we have a terrible habit of doing, we will continue to create many more dead Americans to memorialize. The cycle will go on and on until we finally ask the hard question, collectively and politically, which is: What is our responsibility in those events for which we blame the other?

Each year, on the anniversary of 9/11, we see the same shocking images replayed over and over on our TV screens: slow-motion jetliners crashing into the Twin Towers, which then fast-forwards to skyscrapers bellowing black smoke and then crumbling into dust. We are repeatedly shown the frightened and distorted faces of New Yorkers watching helplessly as the Towers fall, while other footage takes us face-to-face with people running frantically through the thick, ashy dust, disoriented, coughing, covering their mouths. Watching all of this, we go from that angry, tight feeling deep in our guts that those extremists could do something like this to us, to feeling pride for having that resilient spirit when we see that flag waving from the twisted rubble and hear the comforting rumble of our military might on FOX and CNN promising protection and revenge. And each year 9/11 brings us more stories, more interviews, more films, more heroes, more flags, more memorials, all of it utterly worshipful of the U.S. and Americans.

The 9/11 narrative, as with all war narratives, is always the same: we were innocently attacked or provoked by a wretched enemy and we heroically thwarted their schemes, protected the innocent and aided the cause of freedom. The 9/11 Fifth Avenue-quality marketing campaign, with all its carefully crafted language, its graphic imagery, and its fabrication of heroes—firemen, soldiers, tough-talkers—into saints, has all served to create an impenetrable, hypnotic memorial that leaves no room—not one inch—that would allow is to look more deeply at our own responsibility for 9/11, or our behavior leading up to any other conflict or war in which we were an interconnected part.

Sadly, all this amounts to controlling history to create and perpetuate one version, one narrative, where we erase our own misbehavior leading up to a crisis to write a new history beginning only in the moment that we were physically threatened or attacked—a new history that pretends nothing had existed before the “big-bang” and which portrays us as good-guy innocent victims defending freedom. Admittedly, this sounds much better than instigators who had been stirring the pot for years and decades, infringing on the rights and sovereignty of others through manipulation and violence.

As much as it may grate on our nerves, those that attacked us on 9/11 did not just wake up one day, decide that they were envious of our freedom and material prosperity and decide to highjack our airliners. While I do not in any way condone their actions, there is an intimate history here which involves the U.S. and Middle East that leads up to their desperate actions on that September day in 2001. If we can for a moment put ourselves in their shoes, and in the shoes of many other Muslims, this is what that history may look and feel like from their perspective: an utter exhaustion with more than a half-century of U.S. influence, manipulation and occupation in their land, where the West carved up the Middle East after WWI, and where tens of thousands of heavily armed American troops have been stationed along the Arabian Peninsula; frustration with our long history of co-opting Middle Eastern elites to gain access to oil and strategic military bases for American military might; profound distrust with a country that engineered the overthrow of a democratic Iran in 1953, followed by the installment of a U.S. puppet who for twenty-five years did our bidding but was a tyrant to his people; anger at our tenacity in giving material and diplomatic support to Israel while ignoring and even crushing the aspirations of the Palestinians; and mad as heck for our destruction of Iraq in 1991, followed by the even more destructive and inhumane sanctions that led to the deaths of more than a half million children; etc.

This is our history, some of the things we did to them for decades and decades, with all the power at our disposal—military, diplomatic, and public relations, which all told must have included millions of soldiers, analysts, diplomats, weapons manufacturers, logistics experts, PR people, all working like a well-oiled machine to strengthen our foothold in the Middle East. This is a fragment of the real history long before a handful of men came over here and attacked us on that one day.

But to speak that truth would be utter sacrilege. We prefer the fictional narrative that we were innocent victims who were egregiously attacked by fanatical terrorists and that we righteously rose up to slay the enemy, or to chase them into the dessert, or engraved their image and our fears onto a nearby dictator and slew him instead. And to do this, we had to first repress or erase all of the above history—a densely packed century-long volume that would probably reach from the floor to the ceiling of your living room, not to mention the literal removal by the G.W. Bush Administration of over 8,000 pages of the U.N. Security Council Report that detailed our history of weapons and material support to Saddam Husssein. Talk about the blatant removal of history and responsibility! But, again, we had already been doing this for years by our intentional silence and neglect and with piling on the fictional narrative.

Every year on the anniversary of 9/11, or whenever the media decides to rehash that event, all of the worshipful coverage, the many pundits and politicians with one hand over their hearts and the other over their eyes, tighten that fictional narrative more and more, so that open dialogue becomes an impossibility. Worse, to even whisper an alternative narrative is portrayed as unpatriotic and even treasonous. Thus, by their lack of honesty, imagination and compassion our leaders beckon another tragedy. Those planes were hijacked on 9/11 to be sure; but so was history, and that was our doing.

9/11 is only one of the more recent episodes of controlling history to manipulate the future, and is emblematic of what we have been doing since at least WWII. Pearl Harbor is another example. We generally accept as a given that WWII began when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Most high school textbooks as well as seasoned historians reinforce that narrative. Their language here is very close and at times identical to the 9/11 narrative, which always maintains that our history in regards to a particular enemy began the day we were attacked, not before, and certainly not as a result of anything we did.

However, we had been publicly mistreating and humiliating the Japanese since the Versailles conference at the end of WWI. Here President Wilson refused an appeal from the Japanese delegation to be considered as an equal member of the community of nations, disgracing them on the world stage. Not long after that, the U.S. pressured England to break its alliance with Japan—incidentally at the exact time soon-to-be Emperor Hirohito was making a goodwill tour of the West—which was a profound humiliation to the Japanese just as they were reaching out to the world. And it was also around this time, in 1924, that U.S. elites passed a racist immigration law to exclude the “undesirable” and “inferior” Japanese from their democracy. All of this, along with the West’s earlier scramble to colonize Asia, served to give credence to the more hardline factions, whose arguments that Japan must become a bulwark against an imperialist West now seemed utterly credible, and thus they were able to consolidate power and with them arose militaristic Japan. What happened next was Japan simply emulating the West and America by becoming imperialist itself, disregarding the rights and humanity of the Chinese the way the West had done in Africa, the Middle East, India, Asia, Cuba and the Philippines.

I am not suggesting here that the Japanese were not responsible for their own actions. The point is that we are also responsible for what Japan became due to our own insensitive behavior and actions, racism and greed, which contributed, significantly, I would stress, to the course of action in which they embarked. This is admittedly a different way of looking at history. We are used to defining historical periods by those big-bang events, such as Pearl Harbor, and then filling in the rest with tit for tat, this battle and that battle, this war and that war, wallowing in the muck and staying on the surface of things. That, sadly, is typical history-telling in the U.S.

In contrast, by looking more deeply at those neglected threads of history, at our own interwoven and sometimes subtle behavior before the big-bang events, we may acquire a more interconnected, penetrating understanding of why and how such tragic and momentous events such as 9/11 and Pearl Harbor occurred in the first place. Indeed, follow that thread of behavior and responsibility from any conflict, take your pick, Korea, Vietnam, even rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and you will see that our intentions and behavior contributed to the crisis and that we could have treated others better and perhaps avoided so much suffering. This is tough to do in a culture that revels in hagiography, but if we want to be honest with ourselves, with posterity, with other peoples, and prevent the repetition of tragic history, then we must begin to honestly and humbly examine our own behavior, especially our mistreatment and disregard of others that fuels their anger and despair and which erupts into those tragic big-bang events.

In short, what is purity? It is the heart’s mercy for all of nature…. And what is the heart’s mercy? It is a flame that sets the heart ablaze for the whole of creation: human beings, birds, four-legged animals, demons, everything that exists.

When he thinks of them, when he looks of them, a person feels his eyes fill with tears because of the intense compassion wringing his heart. His heart softens and becomes incapable of tolerating , hearing, or seeing a living creature endure the slightest wrong or affliction.

                                                                             -Saint Isaac the Syrian, 7th Century

Misunderstanding, fear, anger, and hatred are the roots of terrorism. They cannot be touched by the military. Bombs and missiles cannot reach them, let alone destroy them, for terrorism lies in the hearts of human beings. To uproot terror, we need to begin by looking in our own hearts. We don’t need to destroy each other, either physically or psychologically. Only by calming our minds and looking deeply inside ourselves will we develop the insight to identify the roots of terrorism. With compassion and communication, terrorism can be uprooted and transformed into love.

                                    -Thich Nhat Hanh (Calming the Fearful Mind: A Zen Response to Terrorism, 10)

DEAR BROTHER,

I AM WRITING THIS LETTER to you, one who has been branded the enemy of my country and the free world, to express the thoughts and feelings of one American. I do not presume to speak for any person other than myself, although I hope and pray that there are many others out there that feel as I do.

I know that you and your people have suffered due to the insensitive actions of my country, the U.S., and the West, historically and today. I know that we have made you angry and desperate, and that you have used the only means that you felt like you had in order to be heard. Indeed, we have silenced your people in the past through the deafening noise of our military might, and more subtlety by way of our manipulative diplomacy and actions. We wanted to have our way at your expense, and we used our powerful resources to serve our own advantage in your land, in your communities, often in disregard to your people, your neighbors, as well as your aspirations, dreams and sovereignty.

I am sorry. I am sorry for our irresponsible actions. I am sorry for our arrogance and blindness. I am sorry that we did not see the people in the Middle East as our brothers and sisters, and approach you in a spirit of love and friendship to create a better world together, rather that looking past your humanity, coveting your land through our greed and selfishness.

Please know, however, that we did this because we too suffer. We did this because we are fearful. In America and throughout much of the West we have built up a civilization whose intrinsic value is determined by its level of material prosperity. This has led us to being overly dependent on material or physical power, rather than the more important power of the heart and spirit. We have relied on the outer power more than we have on an inner or spiritual power. If the world is mostly material, as we seem to believe, then we must exert ourselves to satisfy our perceived needs and to serve our own advantage, or we fear that we will lose something.

In our approach to global affairs, we have been largely driven by a fear of losing three things. We fear that we need the resources of others or we won’t be able to maintain our lifestyle or high standard of living. We fear that we have to enforce our ideology on others or have an ideology forced upon us. And we fear that we have to exert our physical might or the world will spiral out of control. All three of these can be summed up by our belief that we must have as much control as possible in the world, or our way of life may perish, which means that we may perish.

More recently, we have been feverishly driven by another motivation that is based in fear and hatred: revenge. We are simply told that you are our enemy and that we must kill you, regardless of the suffering that we may cause in the process. But I do not want to kill you. I do not want to see you, or others that feel as you do, harmed in any way. I have never felt anger or hatred towards you even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Instead, I felt sad, and mourned the loss of so many innocent lives, and our shared loss of humanity in regards to each other in the midst of so much suffering, confusion and misunderstanding. I pray to see you healed and transformed by compassion, and in the process to see myself and your enemies, my countrymen, healed and transformed by compassion.

Seeking revenge, along with our self-centered approach to global affairs, as you know, has not made the world a better place for you, your people, your neighbors, or for us. Revenge, hatred, fear destroys both the avenger and those who are the targets of his revenge, spiritually and psychologically as well as physically. And revenge is like poison that spreads to our children and grandchildren. We sometimes destroy them before they are even born because of our hardened hearts. We see that tragedy in our world today.

Here in America we have some freedom. Most of us, though not all, have plenty to eat. We have the most powerful military on Earth. But many still live their daily lives in fear and many of us have anxiety about the future. None of these outer things—material freedom, food, power, revenge—have made us truly free. In fact, we have become slaves to these things, and utterly dependent on them for our happiness and safety. We cling to them tightly, and we can hardly imagine our existence without these or some version of them. So, yes, we too suffer, because we we have great prosperity and an equally great fear of losing it. We have forgotten that true happiness and safety comes from treating others the way we want to be treated; the way we would hope that our loved ones would be treated.

I am also very sorry, brother, that we Christians—though we are blessed with diverse faiths and traditions here in the U.S., including with a vibrant Islam—have miserably failed to offer collective insight and clarity in regards to how we should act in the world. Sadly, we have done the opposite of what our faith beckons us to do, what it inspires us to become. I have often felt alone within the Christian community in America because there seems to very few who take the true teachings of Jesus seriously—love, compassion, forgiveness, the Golden Rule—in regards to our global neighbors. While Jesus beckons us with perfect clarity to love our enemies and to do good to them, we instead hate our enemies and seek their destruction. While Jesus tells us to treat others the way we would want to be treated, to love and nurture each other, we often treat them with disregard and negligence, precisely the way we would not want others to treat us or our loved ones.

When we look out at the world from our churches, from our homes, from our communities, we allow fear to guide us rather that the loving spirit of Christ. I am profoundly sorry that we have tragically missed opportunities to become the incarnations of this love and with creative compassion work out our differences peacefully. I am sorry that we have contributed to your suffering. We have not been respectful in our treatment of you, and we failed, and we continue to fail, to be deep listeners. We act from fear and that means we often hear nothing except our own demons. I am sorry.

I do believe there is hope. I have faith that there are many out there who feel as I do. And I believe that the voices of compassion, of clarity, of love, will grow louder and more harmonious. People in my country do love others deeply. They love their children, their families, their friends, their neighbors, as I know you do yours. They just need help in extending that love out into the world, far past the politics of fear and distortion, especially towards those who have been branded as our enemies.

When I look at you, I see past all of the fear and misunderstanding. I see clearly the beautiful likeness and image of God. I see your essence and your spirit. I sense your pain, your frustration, but I also sense your gentleness of spirit. As a student of Gandhi and nonviolence, I have often thought that there was something about you that had the makings of a nonviolent leader—the softness of your voice, the sincerity of your convictions, your charisma, your focus, your sadness. It may not be too late. Imagine transforming your struggle to one of nonviolence. I believe the world would listen more closely. And you would set a precedent, a legacy, which by that one act of profound transformation could change the destiny of your people and perhaps awaken the world to the highest potential that lies within the human heart.

In Peace, Openness and Faith,

Nicholas Patler

GoldenRuleForeignPolicy.com

*This letter of compassion was inspired by one of the great hearts of peace and compassion in our world today, and one who I consider my spiritual brother, teacher and mentor, Thich Nhat Hanh. Also, this letter is published online at Ekurd.net, a great source for news in the Middle East and around the world. Just click here on http://www.ekurd.net/ mismas/articles/misc2010/10/article51.htm for this letter and other original news and commentary.

Begin to process the universe as a friendly rather than an unfriendly place …beginning today, look for the good in people you meet. Remember, for every act of evil there are a million acts of kindness. This universe runs on the energy of harmony and balance. Breathe in that energy and breathe out those ideas of your being life’s victim. All of the attachments to your traumas creates a cellular toxicity in your body, and a spiritual poisoning of your soul.

…

I suggest you embark on an experiment in which you practice unconditional love for several days, perhaps even a week. Make this a private activity, but vow to yourself that you will only allow unconditional loving thoughts to emanate from your consciousness. Make an intense proclamation to live unconditional love for a designated period of time …this act becomes expansive very quickly and you can radiate this love to your community and to people you read about in newspapers, including those who are labeled terrorists, murderers, scam artists and the like …What can you expect as you practice a few days of being total, unconditional love? …you will feel yourself becoming a different person. You will sleep more soundly. You will feel at peace virtually all of the time. You relationships will be more deeply spiritual…

…

Unconditional love is the ultimate mystery of life. It may appear simple, but it is so powerful that it will shake you free of your ego domination if you give it even a short tryout in your life.

                                            Dr. Wayne W. Dyer (Manifest Your Destiny, 115-116, 119, 120-21, 123)

I AM ONE WHO TRIES to walk the path of peace and nonviolence. Sometimes, however, I stumble and fall, and find myself in a place where I can barely make out peace through the fog of distorted self-righteousness. When that happens, judgment and condemnation take the place of inclusiveness and understanding, and I become disdainful of those who I believe are not acting very peaceful. “Why can’t they think more like me?” I grumble to myself. And then I separate them out from myself, and for a moment, at least, they become my nemesis. As a result I lose sight of them and myself—our divine essence and potential—and, with that, I lose insight altogether.

During these times, I can usually still see and feel peace, even if it is from afar, like warm sunshine piercing through dark storm clouds reminding me that true peace is found in the transformative light of deep understanding and unconditional love. With that awareness, I dust myself off and get back on the path, a little freer and a little closer to being the peace and compassion that fills my heart with so much joy when I hold others, particularly those with whom I may disagree, in a spirit of love, and see them as a reflection of myself.

I believe that war and military veterans are a lot like me. Yes, me, a lover of peace who admires the late Mildred Norman, otherwise known as Peace Pilgrim, the way others esteem General George Patton. We walk the path of peace and understanding most of the time. We live in peace within our homes, our communities, at work. We extend a helping hand to our neighbors, compassion to the less fortunate. We desire to see people happy and safe.

Then the winds begin to blow. The skies grow dark and the winds swirl about with so much dust and debris until we can’t see clearly anymore. With our vision impaired, our hearts grow fearful and angry, and we are told that we must kill our enemies to be safe. It seems to make so much sense at the time. They are different from ourselves, evil and out to get us, we are told, and beyond the pale of the kind of humanity—the good kind of humanity—that we intimately know and see everyday. “Why can’t they be more like us?” is quickly answered with, “Because they despise our values, hate our way of life and are enemies of freedom.”

It is not that we can’t find something redeeming about them; we don’t even try. They have become our collective nemesis, and with self-righteous indignation we despise them for not holding the same values that we do. We believe that our way is the right way, and their way is wrong—our way absolutely right; their way absolutely wrong. When this happens, we lose insight in the same proportion that we dehumanize our enemies. We lose compassion. There is no room for understanding. And we go from being peaceful citizens to a culture of warriors which does things that we would otherwise never dream of doing in the course of our normal everyday lives.

My dear veterans, I know that when you go to war, you go with the conviction that you are doing the right thing, that you are protecting us here at home. You are courageous. And you are men and women of honor. I deeply admire you for your commitment and your willingness to sacrifice your comfort and lives for the sake of others.

With that said, I want to share something with you from my heart, which I offer in a spirit of love. I understand that there are times when things get so bad, or reach such a point, that we must use force to protect the innocent. However, most of the time, I am sad to say, we resort to force without genuinely pursuing other options. With only a few exceptions—and I say this as an historian as well as a peace activist—I believe that we have unnecessarily resorted to force in most of the wars and conflicts in which we have been involved. And together we—not only soldiers, but all of us collectively—have created so much destruction and perpetuated so much misunderstanding by not questioning power and not listening deeply to those that we have branded as our enemies. Indeed, our enemies, or those whom we are told to fear and hate, and who, just like us, have families and children that love them, are not even considered worthy of consideration except as targets to be eliminated.

I wish to appeal to you, veterans and our men and women in uniform, to consider reaching toward a higher patriotism. This higher patriotism is not something strange to you either. It is embedded in the values that you hold and practice everyday. It is the voice within you, sometimes only a faint whisper, that at times creates conflict or uneasiness in your heart when you perform your duty to kill as a soldier; or when you support the killing of others through the creation and implementation of technology whose sole purpose is to destroy.

This higher patriotism can also be found in the deep, unconditional love that you feel and express to your children. It can be discovered in the highest precepts of your faith, which beckons you to “love your enemies and do good to them.” Sometimes it calls forth from darkness, flooding your heart with guilt for harming your enemy so that you can see the light of the Golden Rule and the image of God and yourself in the ones you are ordered to harm. And this higher patriotism can be found in the peace and contentment that you feel when you use your indispensable skills and training to provide disaster relief to the destitute, such as when you helped the people of Haiti.

This call always ushers forth from the divine and taps at out hearts, sometimes softly, sometimes loudly, beckoning our allegiance to a higher patriotism based in love, empathy and compassion; a patriotism that transcends man-made boundaries and embraces all people as brothers and sisters together, all children of God. I ask you to please consider heeding this call, the call of your higher conscience, the voice of the divine. In doing so you do not have to stop serving your country. You can serve your country with a greater awareness. You can be part of of an open dialogue right where you are at, perhaps starting with one that questions the necessity of our reliance on power and force, and asking, “Can we do things differently?”

Remember this: bullets and bombs have not made us safer and freer. We only get deeper and deeper into conflicts and wars, and we become slaves to fear as we create more enemies. What will truly set us free and make us safe? Listening deeply to our enemies, giving consideration to those whom we dislike; accepting responsibility for our part in the chaos for which we blame others. In other words, calming ourselves, becoming introspective and simply treating others the way we would want to be treated. If we could make this the first step when confronting challenging people and circumstances, indeed, the cornerstone to national security, we would be on the path to true freedom and safety.

When Conscience Calls Loudly: “Veterans are the light at the tip of the candle”

THICH NHAT HANH, a scholar and peace activist who holds retreats for veterans—and one who I call the Vietnamese Gandhi—stresses that, “Veterans are the light at the tip of the candle.” He goes on to say, “If veterans can achieve awareness, transformation, understanding, and peace, they can share with the rest of society the realities of war. And they can teach us how to make peace with ourselves and each other, so we never have to use violence to resolve conflicts again.”¹

Before ending, I would like to mention two such war veterans, bright lights at the tip of the candle, whose consciences called loudly—so loudly in fact, that they went to extraordinary lengths to respond. The first one is a Vietnam War veteran named Homer Steedly, Jr. Back in 1969, Steedly, the son of a farmer, was an American infantry officer patrolling down a jungle trail in the Central Highlands of Vietnam when he came face to face with his enemy, a Vietcong medic name Hoang Ngoc Dam, also the son of a farmer. Startled by the sudden encounter with their enemy, the soldiers awkwardly raised their weapons at each other with Steedly firing first and killing Dam.

After watching Dam die on that steamy jungle trail, Steedly reached in the dead man’s pocket and pulled out several papers, including a picture of Dam—a photograph that would haunt him for the next thirty-five years—which he mailed back to his mother for safe keeping along with the other papers.

Steedly handing Hoang's papers to his brother, Cat

For the next three decades, Steedly’s repressed guilt seeped through until he finally decided to do something remarkable. In 2005, the former infantry officer went back to Vietnam, half-way across the globe and a world away from the war that still haunted him, to meet the loved ones of the man he had killed, and return Hoang Ngoc Dam’s papers and picture to the family in which they belonged. In a heart-wrenching journey and encounter, Steedly and Dam’s family wept together, embraced each other and talked like cherished friends who had been reunited after many years of separation. Steedly also helped them locate Dam’s remains in the Central Highlands and transport them back to his village of Thai Giang. And in the climax of this incredible journey of forgiveness and reconciliation, Steedly served as one of the pallbearers for his former enemy, carrying the coffin of the man he had killed so many years earlier, as the people of Thai Giang looked on with teary eyes.²

At his website, I like the message that Steedly posts in bold type, for all visitors to see: “As John Lennon so aptly said in his 1969 single, let’s just ‘Give Peace a Chance.’”³

A young Claude Eatherly shortly after entering the Army Air Force

THE NEXT LIGHT at the tip of the candle that I want to mention is a World War II veteran named Claude Eatherly. A gregarious, hard-living young man from a small Texas town who loved to race cars, drink whiskey and gamble, Eatherly, like so many men his age, entered WWII with a desire help save the world from fascism but with no idea, he later admitted, “what war was and didn’t care.” Shortly after entering pilot training, it became clear that Eatherly, described as having “daring and dash about him,” was one of the most capable pilots in the Army Air Force.⁴

After a short stint flying “relatively dangerless milkruns,” Eatherly was sent to train with B-29 bombers. Unknown to him at the time, this was a classified assignment for training pilots to drop firebombs on Japanese cities, which Eatherly participated in. Eventually, the young lieutenant was transferred to an even more ulra-secretive unit, one headed by Colonel Paul Tibbets, which would prepare the pilots for dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.⁵

Eatherly, now a captain, was the chief pilot of a B-29 weather plane named Straight Flush, and his job was to make sure that the skies were clear above Hiroshima on that fateful morning. At around 7:15 am, Captain Eatherly, now above Hiroshima, sent a coded message back to Colonel Tibbets and the crew of the Enola Gay, who were about an hour or so behind: “Target clear, visibility unlimited.” With those few words from Eatherly, Hiroshima’s fate was sealed.⁶

A troubled yet profoundly wise Eatherly later in life

After the war was over, for the next few decades, the once confident, extroverted Eatherly would grow morbidly sullen, tormented for his role in the horrific destruction of Hiroshima. The terrible suffering and deaths of so many men, women and children would literally haunt his dreams, and he eventually became so overwhelmed that he could barely function in society. For several years Eatherly would be in and out of hospitals, and participate in a string of mostly petty crimes, from which he donated stolen money to assist children of Hiroshima, all the while refusing to cash his military pension checks because he considered it blood money.⁷

Yet even as he endured his personal hell, Eatherly wrote and spoke out against war and nuclear weapons. This once “swashbuckling” pilot now spoke to the world with a quiet resolve, reminding it that “the purpose for which we are born is to promote love and understanding among all people.” He would answer his numerous correspondence, from the U.S., Japan and all over the world, by stressing that, “All mankind is alike. I think there are no separations between the people of the world, and the one way that peace may be achieved is through brotherhood and understanding …not only preached, but consistently practiced.”⁸

Dr. Gunther Anders, a German philosopher who was forced into exile by the Nazis, and who had corresponded with Eatherly for two years, wrote a letter to President Kennedy on behalf of the tormented soul he had gotten to know. In this letter, he told the president, “Time and again Eatherly has been called a hero. If he is one, it is not because after his notorious flight he left no more Hiroshima behind him, but because after his notorious treatment (declared mentally incompetent) he dares to cry: ‘No more Hiroshima!’”⁹

*I dedicate this essay in honor of my great uncle, Master Sargent James Gray Ervin (1916-2008), an Army Air Force veteran of WWII, who had spent his entire career, more than three decades, in the U.S. Air Force.

ONE OF THE MAIN MOTIVATIONS for creating the Nicholas Patler Foundation for Transforming Global Relationships was to unabashedly interject love and compassion into U.S. foreign policy discourse and into a new vision for global relations—admittedly the last places on earth where we would expect to hear or see the words love and compassion. As an important Washington insider recently admitted in an interview, “Politics and human rights (you have to love others to make their rights paramount) don’t go to well together,” after which he chuckled amusedly, as if to reinforce the absurdity of linking the two.

And he is right: the love of both humans and their rights are not fundamental to our politics. Our politics have been reduced to a tiresome, selfish competition between different interests, usually driven by fear and distortion, where bickering, grandstanding and fighting is the norm, and which often infringes upon or neglects basic human rights for different people, who are themselves reduced to abstractions.

“What politicians chiefly do in Washington, I came to learn,” observed psychologist M. Scott Peck, after havng spent time working for the government, “is fight …They also fight dirty. And, finally, they mostly fight each other.” He goes on to say, “It is pervaded by an atmosphere of constant competiveness, hostility and distrust.”[1]

It is indeed strange that love and compassion, these powerful, constructive and creative energies, should be so definitively out of place within the world of global politics, or any politics for that matter. Politics is such a vitally important space of human interaction that always involves other people. It is where we should be practicing the art of embracing each other rather than excluding and abusing each other. If you suddenly arrived here from another planet you would expect that it would be here, in this collective space, where we come together as a human species to advance our own welfare, that we would value and practice cooperation, trust, understanding and compassion, all aspects or counterparts of love. What could be more important to serving our welfare and the welfare of our planet? We unquestionably value love in our personal relationships, indeed, we often treat love as the supreme value, yet we utterly deny its efficacy in collective activities such as politics and global relations.

Politics is also where we decide the kinds of qualitative relationships that we will have with other countries and peoples. And let me back up here for a second to clarify what we mean by love—our vision here at NPF—within the context of politics and foreign policy: when we talk about love, we mean the relationship between peoples-nations that strives to creatively and empathetically contribute to the welfare and development of all (see “Why Golden Rule” at the top of webpage). But most of the time, our relationships are either not as good as they could be, where we never really get to know or understand the interests and needs of our global neighbors outside of the choreographed world of diplomatic niceties; or our global relationships are down-right terrible, such as when we refuse to talk to leaders, much less listen to them, and where we often resort to bullying them because we don’t approve of their rhetoric or actions.

Sadly, we often use this important human space we call politics, particularly our global politics, to formulate ways to take advantage of others to get something that we desire. We care more about what lies beneath their lands, or how they can prosper us, more than we do about their happiness and welfare.

This seems profoundly true when we consider U.S. National Security, the most powerful of all American institutions, where since the 1950s we have poured mind-boggling amounts of material and human resources, unprecedented energy and focus—trillions of dollars and millions of people, mostly to create technology and weapons to destroy—in an attempt to keep ourselves safe from perceived enemies and threats, which has usually worked out as a convenient opportunity to take advantage of peoples for our own aggrandizement. (Imagine what we could have done had this hyper-focus been on alleviating world hunger and thirst! With that in mind, institutions and activities that absorbs our time and resources to control and kill, draining our energy and creativity which are needed to uplift others, are not political problems, but are rather an unprecedented moral problem.) 

It should be no surprise that things have gotten progressively worse, such as with terrorism, and that rather than making us more secure, selfishness and aggression has made us profoundly more insecure. It really could not be any other way. Why? First, because I believe that in our approach to global affairs we habitually violate, or fail to align ourselves and integrate with a fundamental aspect that underlies our existence and our universe: love. Dr. Wayne Dyer, one of the spiritual giants of our time, believes that “unconditional love is the power behind creation” which “guides all of our natural laws.” Theologian and historian Paul Tillich stated unabashedly that there is “no higher principle” in the universe than love. “It is life itself in its actual unity,” wrote Tillich. Mildred Norman, famously known as Peace Pilgrim, and who during her lifetime had walked more than 25,000 miles for peace, believed that “the universe operates in accordance with the Law of Love.” She confidently maintained that spiritual “concepts” such as the “Golden Rule,” which are aspects of love, are “laws governing human conduct …which apply as rigidly as the law of gravity.” When we violate the law of love, stressed Peace Pilgrim, we get out of harmony with the natural order of things and “chaos results,” creating all kinds of problems in our world, individually and collectively.[3]

Another great sage of our day (I hope that we can take to heart the wisdom of the great sages in our world today, and realize that we, too, can be sages), Michael Nagler, a retired UC Berkeley professor and peace scholar, explains that when we commit violence against others, on any level, we “tear the fabric of life,” this loving unity that appears to underlie our existence, and “something goes shockingly wrong.” Nagler goes on to say that “this has led to the devastation of whole societies,” which should be a wake-up call for countries such as the U.S. that relies on violence, such as missiles, bombs, force and manipulation for national security.[4]

Next, when we tear the fabric of love that seems to underlie our existence, or fail to align ourselves with it, we actually fulfill what may be another fundamental aspect of our universe as our aggressive orientation creates more aggression: the fulfillment of the law of attraction. We simply get back what we put out, both by way our thoughts and feelings as well as our physical actions. This has not only been stressed by most of our religious traditions (our power at the thought and feeling level), but it seems that it is now being confirmed by innovative experiments.

A renowned Japanese scientist named Dr. Masaru Emoto, for example, discovered that emotions can have a visible impact on the molecules of water: positive ones produce beautiful crystal structures when the water is frozen and negative ones produce distorted structures. He concludes, “Our emotions and feelings have an effect on the world moment by moment. If you send out words and images of creativity, then you will be contributing to the creation of a beautiful world. However, emitting messages of destruction, you contribute to the destruction of the universe.[5] 

With that in mind, it should be no surprise that our approach to national security has almost always lead to national and global insecurity. When we think, feel and create from a place of fear and profound distrust, it is precisely more fear and distrust that is reflected back to us in the world. I believe if we begin to replace missiles and bombs with compassion and insight, we will see more compassion and insight from our global neighbors. We are deeply interwoven and interconnected with the world and creation in a way that both includes and transcends the physical, as we will see.

In Parts two through five we will take a look at both of these separately and together, love and the law of attraction, which will include a look at their spiritual, historical and scientific underpinnings.[6]We will also place them within the context of politics and global affairs in an attempt to understand more clearly why our thinking and our policies so often fails miserably in helping the world to become a more supportive place for its inhabitants. Finally, we will discuss the amazing potential for creating transformative change when we align our politics and foreign policy with both an understanding of and faith in love and the law of attraction. Here we will see that we could be the most secure, nationally and globally, when we put the best of ourselves—love, compassion, empathy, gratitude and understanding—into our politics, into our global relationships, into our world.

One more thing: I know all of this may sound a bit strange, particularly when we are talking about transforming something that seems so fixed and out of our control as politics and global relations, and with such seemingly nebulous concepts as love, which we have been conditioned to identify with weakness, and the law of attraction, which is sometimes considered a New Age concept. But please have confidence in our shared ability to create positive change with new ways of understanding ourselves and our world. As Pitirim Sorokin, the founder of the Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism, reminded us back in the 1950s: “[T]he very essence of creativity is an untiring invention of ever-new values, different from the existing ones.”[7] And David Bohm, a quantum physicist who with a mystical awareness believed that everything was deeply interconnected, boldly stressed to the scientific and non-scientific worlds that “you must look for truth, no matter where it takes you; no matter how it looks.”[8]

I think that perhaps the invention of ever-new values and the search for truth, no matter how unorthodox, may end up leading us to a new, profound understanding of and commitment to the highest values that we already hold, things deeply familiar to us and which we know intuitively, such as the universal truth and power in the Golden Rule and the precept of loving our enemies. Peace Pilgrim reminds us that we can transform ourselves and our world by “putting into practice all the good things we believe.” She always taught that these “are already common belief” and that you can “begin by doing all the good things that you are motivated toward and giving them priority in your life…”   

Whether we invent new values, or put into practice the values that we already cherish, we must love others first and foremost, and I believe that the courage to transcend conventional and traditional practices will come naturally. Love must be our guide, giving us the confidence deep down in the core of our being that things can be better, and then I believe we will be to able expand our political horizons further, opening the way for the creation of miracles on the international stage that were once sworn to be impossible.

Let Helen Keller inspire us here. Born with the unimaginable disabilities of deafness and blindness, she overcame what most people of her day considered utterly impossible by becoming a teacher, visionary and sage. Read and feel her words, and let them inspire us to creatively bring love and understanding into our world: “The joy of surmounting obstacles which once seemed unremovable, and pushing the frontier of accomplishment further—what joy is there like unto it?”[9]

(To see footnotes, click on “Footnotes” icon at the top of this webpage)

Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the "Frontier Gandhi"

SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY happened eighty years ago in the rugged North West Frontier of India, not far from the border of Afghanistan. The Muslim tribesman who lived in that part of the world, known as Pathans or Pushtuns, notorious for their violence and blood revenge code of honor, had laid down their guns and daggers to instead “love their enemies” and embrace nonviolence.   

Historian and spiritual writer Eknath Easwaran explains that, “No one could have anticipated that such a phenomenon …would emerge from the seething Pathan badlands.”[1]For well over a century the Pathans had not only used terror and guerilla tactics against their British occupiers, but they also feuded with each other over almost any perceived wrong or humiliation, trapped in a perpetual cycle of fighting and killing. As one Pathan admitted in an interview, his people were “so hot-headed that you have to tie back their hands to keep them from fighting.”[2]   

This transformation from violence to nonviolence was so unexpected that even Gandhi, suspicious of the rumors of nonviolent Pathans which had been trickling down into the interior of India, decided to make a pilgrimage to the Frontier to see if the these famous warriors were “truly nonviolent.” “I am yearning to test the truth for myself of the claim that they have imbibed the spirit of nonviolence,” he explained shortly before his departure.[3]   

Gandhi was not disappointed. Under the charismatic leadership of Abdul Ghaffer Khan, sometimes referred to as the Frontier Gandhi, the Pathan tribes were united as one people, and were being enthusiastically trained to confront the British through the weapon of nonviolent civil disobedience. While there, Gandhi talked with and even prodded the Pathan tribesman to test their commitment to nonviolence. They answered repeatedly that their “nonviolence was absolute” and “unbending,” and when asked if they really believed in nonviolence, they responded, “with all our hearts.”[4]Gandhi pressed further to test their resolve even in the absence of their charismatic leader. “What will your reaction be if Khan one day decides to change and starts to believe in violence?” To which one of Khan’s generals responded, “We can leave Badshah Khan but we cannot leave nonviolence.”[5]   

What did it? What created this “totally improbable” transformation that would possibly be the equivalent today of the Taliban suddenly embracing nonviolence? There are several factors that account for this, and I encourage you to explore them more fully in the books, Nonviolent Soldier of Islam and Pathan Unarmed, both of which are cited at the end of this essay.   

However, at the root of this transformation was love. Love. With a Gandhi-like spirit, Khan, known affectionately as Badshah, or Emperor of Emperors, internalized unconditional love, the most important precept of spiritual nonviolence. Easwaran writes that Khan “discovered that love can create more in a second than bombs can destroy in a century” and “that the kindest strength is the greatest strength.”[6] Moreover, he expressed that love in word and action—and in a way that transcended word and action. “[T]here was something in the way he spoke, it was with love,” recalled one Pathan. Anthropologist Mukulika Banerjee explained that “his personal manner and practice could often communicate what words and abstract ideas could not…”[7]     

Having purged himself of ingrained hatred and fear, and by deeply internalizing humble love and universal compassion, Badshah Kahn inspired his people to tap into the highest aspects of themselves as well, and he taught them to carry that into their relationships with each other and the British. And these higher aspects, he stressed, could be seen in a renewed and more accurate understanding of Islam, which, he believed, was deeply compatible with nonviolence: “It is my utmost conviction that Islam is amal, yakeen, muhabat”—self-less service, faith and love.” For Badshah Khan, selfless-service meant that serving God was best done by serving humanity—Pathan and British; faith was trusting in the spiritual laws that underlie all life, especially love, and the ability of every human being to respond to those laws; and he saw love as a universal power, not mere sentiment, that could utterly transform the human heart and human affairs.[8]   

Drawing on the Quran, he taught that forgiveness, patience and self-restraint—aspects of nonviolence—were more worthy than violence in the eyes of Allah. For example, in Al Shura 42:43, it says, “But indeed if any show patience and forgive, that would truly be an exercise of courageous will, and resolution in the conflict of affairs.”[9]In his sweeping history of nonviolence, Mark Kurlansky writes that “Khan’s stated concept of Islam was this: ‘The Holy Prophet Mohammed came into this world and taught us, “The man is a Muslim who never hurts anyone by word and deed, but who works for the benefit and happiness of God’s creatures.”’[10]   

Badshah Khan in white with his nonviolent army

The humble leader also stressed to curious outsiders as well as his Pathans that “nonviolence …was followed fourteen hundred years ago by the Prophet (Mohammed) all the time he was in Mecca.”[11] In the Hadith, for example, Mohammed teaches, “Help your brother, whether he is an aggressor or victim of aggression …by doing your best to stop him from aggression.”[12]In speeches given throughout the Frontier, Badshah Khan explained that Mohammed responded to the oppression of Muslims in Mecca with “a thing that no power on earth would be able to stand against …patience and righteousness!”[13] And he drilled home to his followers that this patience and righteousness that the Prophet taught were synonymous with the nonviolence that he was now teaching them.[14]   

In addition to helping his people see and experience their faith with new eyes and fresh hearts, the humble Emperor of Emperors also encouraged them to actively use their own peaceful mechanisms for feud resolution, such as jirgas and kaunda. The former is a means for resolving small conflicts and disagreements with third party support. The latter is used for the peaceful resolution of more serious disagreements in which people or parties had been feuding for years.[15]      

This all highlights an important fact that every culture, including those which are seen as excessively violent—indeed, those that we outsiders often define and dismiss as only violent—has alternative peaceful methods within their belief systems for dealing with challenges and conflict. We ignore that, or it does not serve our purposes, so we nurture the popular imagination with the more exotic and useful image of an inherently violent Pathan, or Palestinian, or terrorist.     

How much does this negative popular image of our fellowman that we nurture within our own hearts, one-dimensional and inflexible, contribute to the violence and suffering that ends up impacting us all? We leave no room for imagining something—or someone—different, or more multifaceted, and as a result our collective responses profoundly lack compassion, understanding and creativity. Moreover, we get more of what we expect from our carefully crafted but painfully narrow perspective. As sage and writer M. Scott Peck stressed, “Treat people as if they are violent madmen long enough, and sure enough, they will become violent madmen.”[16]   

Pathan women: stepping from behind the veil to open leadership   

FOR THE PATHANS, nonviolence and love had swept away fear, hatred and despair—literally almost overnight—and created a profound sense of empowerment and stability individually and collectively. With this newfound feeling of security and being in control of their own destiny, they were receptive to loosening their grip on a cultural practice that also had some basis in fear: purdah. Easwaran describes purdah as a “traditional system …which restricts Muslim women from participating fully in society.”[17]   

I have to wonder if purdah in general, and particularly the most repressive practices and violent manifestations of purdah, may have something to do with the long history of invading and occupying powers in Afghanistan. And certainly the daily violence there in that part of the world today, I believe, can be attributed in part to our brutal actions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, where we have engaged the Afghan people through the barrel of a gun or tank, helping them make war and making war against them. This continuous cycle of violence may have led to a more restrictive practice of purdah in some cases, pushing women further out of the public eye in a society already deeply patriarchal and sadly making them more vulnerable to the anger and despair of men overwhelmed by living in a perpetual war zone.

Pathan women in the 1930s

This appears to have been the case in the North West Frontier of the 1930s. But with Pathan transformation well under way, Badshah Khan felt confident that he could begin to publicly challenge the most repressive aspects of purdah. The empowerment of women had always been close to his heart. He had started a Pathan journal, Pushtun, to spread his ideas of nonviolence and in its pages he questioned purdah. “Except for the Pathan,” Khan boldly declared, “the women have no enemy …O Pathan, when you demand your freedom, why do you deny it to women?”[18]   

Now keep in mind that either or both by lineage and culture, these were some of the ancestors to the Taliban, which makes what happened next all the more remarkable. Easwaran writes that “women …almost overnight stepped from the medieval world behind the veil to open leadership.” And the Frontier was far from being known as liberal or progressive. Indeed, it had traditionally been a bastion of Islamic conservatism.   

However, things were changing quickly and profoundly on the Frontier. The power of love—and make no mistake about it: love is a power—was shaking loose the hardened rust of fear and rigidity, and like tapping into the power of the atom it was releasing the incredible inner forces of insight and compassion that lies within all of us. In the midst of this amazing transformation, Badshah Khan boldly advocated not only freeing women from the confines of purdah, but he went further than anyone could have imagined possible by inviting women to participate equally with men in his nonviolent movement. In a speech to a large gathering in a Frontier town, Khan linked national liberation with the liberation of Pathan women. Here he declared,   

                        “God makes not distinction between men and women. If someone   

                        can surpass another, it is only through good deeds and morals.   

                        If you study history, you will see that there were many scholars   

                        and poets amongst women. It is a grave mistake we have made   

                        in degrading women…   

                        If we achieve success and liberate the motherland, we solemnly   

                        promise you that you will get your rights. In the Holy Quran,   

                        you have an equal share with men. You are today oppressed   

                        because we men have ignored the commands of God and the   

                        Prophet. Today we are followers of custom and we oppress you.   

                        But thank God that we have realized that our gain and loss,   

                        progress and downfall, are common.[19]   

Did the men in this traditionally patriarchal society rise up in protest, which is what we might have expected? Or did they at least question the wisdom of their leader for transgressing a social taboo? Far from it! Rather, it appears that they took to heart their leader’s words and relaxed their grip on purdah. One Pathan man recalled that when Badshah Khan went to speak in villages “women flocked to him …and the men didn’t mind.” A young woman who actively participated in the movement explained that “the men did not object—after all, I could do what they could not. I persuaded other women to come along to the meetings.” And yet another explained that in regards to women the men listened to Badshah Khan, whom they deeply trusted, and their eyes and hearts were opened.[20]   

In what Banerjee calls a “major breakthrough for Pathan women,” under the leadership of Badshah Khan they

An elderly Badshah Khan who for the rest of his life challenged militarism and nationalism in Pakistan

now enjoyed “unprecedented access to public activity.” They spoke at rallies all across the Frontier; they participated in, led and even inspired nonviolent confrontation of the British; and they continued to participate in more traditional forms of activity with inspired creativity, such as when “200 to 300 women appeared” at a polling station “with Qurans on their heads to persuade voters not to record their votes” in an unfair election. Even Badshah Khan’s own sister, whose leadership in the movement he boasted of proudly, addressed meetings throughout the Frontier. And in 1937, another long-held custom was swept away when a law was passed that women should now share in their family inheritance, which before that was restricted solely to men.[21]   

    

Conclusion    

    

Seventeen years after the Pathan nonviolent movement had begun, the British, exhausted and demoralized by the resilience of their transformed nonviolent enemy, and who had been there for almost 150 years, packed up and went home. As incredible as that was, the amazing transformation of the Pathans from violence to nonviolence has far broader implications than what occurred in the North West Frontier. I believe it demonstrates what is possible when people, any people anywhere, activate the highest aspects of themselves, such as love and compassion, and take that into their relationships with each other, enemy and friend alike. It literally removes blockages to mobility and empowerment, such as it did by loosening purdah for women living on the Frontier. This should inspire us with confidence that if it could happen with the “notoriously warlike Pathans,” steeped in their restrictive customs, it could happen with the Taliban, or groups that we have labeled as terrorists.[22]   

Nonviolence on the Frontier reveals most importantly the incredible power of love—love as a universal force—which is something that escapes our normal rational efforts to explain. These once proud warriors of violent combat had turned the other cheek and they had developed an “emotion of genuine love for the enemy.” They vowed “not to take revenge on anybody,” whereas before revenge had been interwoven with their deep sense of honor, and they proudly lived up to that new vow.[23]   

I believe that we can better understand how such a transformation could occur when we see love through the eyes of some our greatest sages. As mentioned in a few earlier essays,[24]love may be a power that underlies our existence, spiritual and physical. Wayne Dyer believes that “the energy of unconditional love is the power behind creation” and that it “guides all of our natural laws.” Matthew Fox writes that there may be “a hidden connection of love or compassion that grounds us and keeps us grounded in the universe.” Itzhak Bentov, a natural intuitive with no formal education, says, “What we call ‘love’ is an energy …that pervades the whole universe.” He goes on to propose that love may even be the basis of gravitation. And Peace Pilgrim believed that love was such a powerful law of the universe that those who internalized it (such as Badshah Khan), “could offset the ill effects of masses of out-of-harmony people.” This is precisely what happened in nonviolent movements across the globe, including those led by Khan, Gandhi and Dr. King.[25]   

Even modern day scientific experiments seem to be supporting the above sages by demonstrating in controlled conditions that when people collectively tap into the highest aspects of themselves, they can non-physically create harmony and coherence in highly chaotic and conflict environments (we will explore this more in forthcoming essays. For now check out the books, A Manual for a Perfect Government and Permanent Peace). The Pathans seemed to have tapped into, or connected with a power, perhaps the power, that may very well be fundamental to our existence. So there is something going in the collective transformative experiences like that of the Pathans that we cannot explain without reexamining those aspects of our existence that rationalism steers clear of, such as love, compassion and empathy, and how those creative forces or energies work within our consciousness and the universe.     

Finally, the example of the Pathans, and other nonviolent movements, should inspire us to find alternative political frameworks for understanding and dealing with challenging situations. Our age-old methods of war and manipulation have repeatedly failed because by engaging others through force we set ourselves up for more problems. We get back what we put out. And as the Pathan experience demonstrates, the tools of love and compassion, internalized and practiced, can utterly transform chaos and conflict, creating in their place freedom, empowerment and mobility. 

Like Badshah Khan and others, we also need to find creative ways to expect the best and to carry our best into our politics and global relationships. I like what Napoleon Hill and W. Clement Stone, two of the great teachers of positive thinking, stressed to their readers, which they found to be a common belief and practice among the successful creative thinkers that they studied:  ”Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe the mind of man can achieve …recognize the possibility of the improbable.”  

*To see footnotes, click on “Footnotes” icon at the top of this webpage. Also, this essay can be read online at Ekurd.net, a great source for news and original commentary in the Middle East. Just click on http:// www.ekurd.net/mismas/ articles/misc2011/2/article69.htm  

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IN PART ONE OF THIS ESSAY, I began to explain that the reason why our approach to national security so often leads to national and global insecurity is because we often violate, or fail to align ourselves and integrate with what may be a fundamental aspect of our natural existence: love. I briefly quoted several of our great sages who understood love as a power or energy that underlies our existence and our universe, similar to our natural laws, but even more significant since love, they believed, may even guide those natural laws.  

And if that was not unorthodox enough, I went on to mention that there may be another vitally important aspect of our existence, the law of attraction, which is closely connected with the law of love. The law of attraction says that our thoughts and feelings attract everything into our lives. In other words, there is a reciprocal power in the universe, one that involves us. I explained that when we tear or violate the fabric of love, such as through violence and selfishness, we attract through this reciprocal power more chaos and distortion. In a nutshell, we simply get back more of what we put out, both by way of our thoughts and feelings as well as our physical actions. I proposed that if we would begin to replace missiles and bombs, and threat diplomacy with genuine compassion and insight, we would see more compassion and insight from our global neighbors, even in the most challenging circumstances.   

Love: reconsidering our world and ourselves  

THE READER may be surprised to learn (and perhaps not) that love and the law of attraction as a cosmic energy or force, far from being fantasy-type thinking, has spiritual-wisdom, historical-precedent and modern scientific underpinnings. 

In the next two parts of this essay series, which includes here in part two and then continuing through part three, we will look at love from these three perspectives, spiritual, historical and scientific. Then in part four we will take a look at the law of attraction within the context of these three perspectives. Finally, in part five, we will see the incredible experimental and anecdotal evidence which seems to reveal this reciprocal power in action. Here we will see that this reciprocal power seems to work best when our intentions and focus are based in love, compassion and peace, revealing a harmony that appears to underlie our existence and universe and which is most responsive to us when we are in harmony with it. 

But before we go any further, it may help us to have a working definition of love—how we define it here at NPF in our preamble—and how we will adapt that definition within a very different context for this essay. Our working definition of love is the active relationship between peoples-nations that strives to empathetically and creatively contribute to the welfare and development of all. Since in this essay we will be dealing primarily with love as an underlying aspect of our existence, or love energy, rather than as an active approach on a collective-political level, a revised working definition of love for our purposes here, which, as we will see, has support from many deep, introspective souls, contemporary and historical, may sound something like this: love is the underlying, living energy at the core of existence that harmoniously and coherently gives rise to the physical world.  

If this definition of love as an underlying energy seems odd and unconventional to you, I completely understand. It is. But as Dr. Jacob Liberman, a world authority in holistic vision care, stressed: “Some of our most prominent physicists (Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg) have considered the possibility that there are forms of energy that science has yet to acknowledge.”[1] With that in mind, why not love as one of those forms of energy? And as we will see, there are many great minds and hearts that have expressed just such a view.     

“The law of love governs the world”

WE ALL KNOW that love is an important aspect of our spiritual traditions. But that by itself has generally not inspired a transformation in our collective behavior because, firstly, we treat it as an anomaly to our existence, rather than intrinsic to our existence (ie: the world is bad and just does not work that way; besides, universal love is for the divine, not mortals).  

And secondly, we view love as something personal and sentimental, and any extension of that love outside of the sphere of home or perhaps community/group makes us feel vulnerable because we have been conditioned to identify it as a weakness in what we have been taught is a dangerous or precarious world. In short, selfishness and aggression is taken as the norm and love as the exception. And that always leads to a fear-based worldview, which cannot possibly accommodate an all-embracing love. With that considered, what else could we expect from such an orientation other than negative manifestations, such as conflict and war, and our perceived helplessness in solving our global problems?  

Pitirim Sorokin

In contrast—striking, earth-shaking contrast—there is substantial evidence that tells us a profoundly different story, a transcendent epic of universal proportions: love, rather than being an anomaly, is instead an intrinsically responsive, dynamic and powerful aspect of our existence. Indeed, it may very well be the power that permeates the cosmos and natural world. “Everywhere in the inorganic, organic and psycho-social worlds the integrating and uniting role of love functions incessantly,” wrote sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, founder of the Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism in the 1950s, and who had produced what is still perhaps the most monumental study of love in modern times. Sorokin believed that “[w]ithout the operation of love energy, the physical, the biological and the socio-cultural cosmos would have fallen apart.”[2]  

Many sages and deep thinkers have also expressed Sorokin’s view of love as the life force or power that underlies our existence. Psychologist Wayne Dyer believes that “the power of unconditional love is the power behind creation. It guides all our natural laws.” Itzhak Bentov, a natural intuitive with the insight of a physicist and mystic, insisted that “love is the energy or radiation that pervades the whole cosmos. It is possibly the basis of what we know as the phenomenon of gravitation.” In Brothers Karamazoff, the deep-penetrating Russian novelist, Feodor Dostoyevsky, expressed love as “the most effective force, the most terrific, the most powerful, unequaled by any other force in the world.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. also maintained that “love is the most durable power in the world,” and his mentor, Gandhi, declared that “the law of love governs the world.” In the New Testament we read that “God is love” and that “love is more important than anything else. It is what ties everything together.” Similarly, Peace Pilgrim, echoing Gandhi almost verbatim, expressed God as the love which “creates all and sustains all and binds all together and gives life to all.” Finally, scientist and futurist Joseph Chilton Pearce writes that the ancient Greek philosopher “Plotinus spoke of a ‘superplentitude of love’ creating universes to express that love…”[3]  

Gandhi, who Sorokin called a “great power station” of love, believed love to be “the strongest force the world possesses.” He viewed love as “a cohesive force,” akin to and even potentially more significant than natural laws which, he believed, we could use to ”work even greater wonders” than “scientists” have done with the “laws of nature.” (And we know what Gandhi did!)[4]  

In the 1950s Sorokin equated the “unifying physical forces” in the quantum realm with the “manifestation of love energy.”  And Gandhi, writing more than three decades earlier during the birth of quantum physics, wrote that there was a “cohesive force among the atoms that comprise this globe” which is also in “animate beings,” and that “the name for this cohesive force is Love.”[5]  

As early as 1921, when survival of the fittest reigned supreme (and still does for many today), Gandhi maintained that “mutual love enables Nature to persist,” rather than the Darwinian war of nature. He intuited, I believe, the new research that would begin to emerge in biology a quarter century later, which would stress that “the cooperative forces are biologically the more important and vital than the antagonizing ones”—cooperative forces which Sorokin maintained were permeated by “a form of love energy.” He boldly declared that “without the operation of a biological counterpart of love energy, life itself is not possible…”[6]   

More recently, and as we saw in part one, there is exciting research that has been conducted by a Japanese scientist named Dr. Masaru Emoto which seems to point to just such a love energy in nature. This unorthodox scientist discovered that emotions can have a visible impact on the molecules of water: positive ones, such as love and gratitude, produce beautiful crystal structures when the water is frozen and negative ones produce distorted structures. Dr. Emoto boldly concluded: “This indicates that love and gratitude are fundamental to the phenomenon of life in all of nature.”[7]  

As we saw in an earlier essay here at NPF, most of our spiritual traditions beckon us in some sense to stretch toward our divine heritage, to become divine-like, by becoming the incarnation of love and compassion. Implicit here is that universal harmony is synonymous with love and counterparts of love. We align ourselves, or get in sync with the divine or the highest attribute of God by internalizing and practicing universal love.    

Ashley Montagu

We are also inherently, by nature, loving beings, reflections or expressions of a loving universe or God. In his interdisciplinary study, The Practice of Love, anthropologist Ashley Montagu and other scientists and scholars concluded that “from birth onward” people are “biologically organized” to be naturallycooperative and even altruistic, which is in striking contrast to the prevailing belief, imparted to us by way of our schools, churches, movies and media, that we are by nature aggressive and selfish. But the “evidence indicates that human beings are born good—‘good’ in the sense that there is no evil or hostility in them.” While “we have been miseducated out of the capacity to be lovers of our fellow human beings,” Montagu stresses that we come into the world “wholly prepared, equipped, to function as creatures who not only want and need to be loved by others but who also want and need to love others.”[8] I like the way biologist Bruce Lipton put it in his groundbreaking book, Biology of Belief: “[W]e are spiritual beings who need love as much as we need food.”[9]    

It appears, then, that human beings are born in natural harmony with the love energy or force that seems to permeate the universe. Our spiritual traditions seem to support this by calling us back to our origins—to stretch toward our divine heritage—to be more universally loving and compassionate. “But I tell you to love your enemies,” stressed Christ, for example. ”Then you will be acting like your Father in heaven.”[10] If love were not an intrinsic part of us, if we were selfish and aggressive by nature, why would the best of our spiritual traditions tell us to love—indeed, that we can love like the divine? (See the below essay at this website, The Power of Love—literally! Stretching Toward Our Divine Heritage).  

TO CONCLUDE this section, love appears to be, in the words of Sorokin, “one of the highest forms of a unifying, integrating, harmonizing, creative energy or power.” As the above sages, traditions, scientists, and scholars tell us (and as we will see below), love is the highest creative power, force or energy that permeates and informs all things—the universe, nature, and even ourselves. 

I hope as you continue to read on, you will feel the excitement of knowing that by changing your view of reality—by seeing love as the essence of who you are and the world you live in, by understanding that love is the norm of our existence and selfishness and aggression the anomaly—you can change your world, and that together we can begin to transform our institutions and make the world a more supportive and nurturing place for all of its inhabitants.  

(For footnotes and suggested reading, click on the “Footnotes” icon located at the top of the webpage).  

THE UNORTHODOX HARVARD sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, who believed that love is an “integrating and unifying” energy that “functions incessantly,” stressed that “thinkers viewed even the unifying forces of gravitation, of the unification of electrons and protons in the atom …as the manifestation of love energy acting in the physical world.”[1] Indeed, it is here in the quantum realm where we can gain a glimpse of what I believe, like Sorokin, Gandhi and others, is the energy of love, or love in action at the core of our existence. It is also here, in this deep realm of life, where we can gain a better understanding of how profoundly interwoven and interconnected we are with life, and as such, how the “love energy” that seems to permeate life responds to our thoughts and feelings, and most optimally to our highest intentions when they are based in love and compassion.  

In the early years of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein introduced us to the notion of universal interconnectedness when he gave us the idea that space and time were intimately interconnected. A short time later, delving into the quantum realm, one of the fathers of quantum physics, Werner Heisenberg, wrote that the quantum world was characterized by deep connections that purposefully work in harmony. “There appears to be a complicated tissue of events” that “determines the texture of the whole,” explained Heisenberg. “It is, in essence, a set of relationships that reach outward to other things.”[2]Fritjof Capra, a deeply spiritual quantum physicist, summed up the quantum   

Fritjof Capra

 world as “interconnections.” He explained that “as we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated basic building blocks, but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of a unified whole …which can only be defined by their interrelations.” Capra colorfully described the activity within these interrelations as “the continuous dance of energy.”[3] And Gandhi captured this aspect of the quantum world when he wrote, “If you could see the inner springs of actions and not the outward manifestations thereof, you would find a wonderful unity …Life is one indivisible whole” supported by an “underlying …living power.”[4]   

While scientists do not know what this mysterious dance of energy or living power is they know what is does: it works and unfolds in harmony as a purposeful and coherent energy to give form to physical reality. Dyer writes, “It is the invisible force that supports the substance of our material life.”[5] Heisenberg described in this way: “Energy is in fact the substance from which all elementary particles, all atoms, and therefore all things are made, and energy is that which moves.”[6]   

If we add to Heisenberg’s description of energy, love, then perhaps the mystery becomes a little clearer. We could then say that there is a profoundly dynamic, cooperative relationship at the core of our existence which appears to be, in the words of Sorokin, the “manifestation of love energy,” or, as Dyer maintains, the energy of “unconditional love” as “the divine source of all material things.”[7]   

I remember when a new friend first introduced me to quantum physics. She had been studying the metaphysical implications of quantum physics for thirty years, and she gave me Fritjof Capra’s The Turning Point as an introduction (which is splendidly more than an introduction!). Shortly after reading the first several chapters, especially where Capra describes the quantum world as “the continuous dance of energy” and “rhythmic patterns,” my friend asked me what I thought. I told her that it was a deeply moving spiritual experience for me. I explained that as I read I felt like I was witnessing the purposeful movement of God, the movement of love, there in the realm of our existence from which life emerges. Feeling like I had been privy to a divine mystery and had witnessed a miracle, I simply breathed out, “I saw God,” after which I could not say anything else.   

If there is creative love energy anywhere, it is here; and if love is here, in the quantum realm, revealed through physics, where we receive our basic framework for imagining the core of life, it is everywhere. Love, then, is life, and, I believe, the true nature of matter and us. It is our natural condition on every level, in every respect, spiritual and physical. And we are intimately a part of this divine-like miracle down to the very core of our existence.   

Werner Heisenberg

quantum physics has revealed that there is no separation between the observer and what is being observed. As Heisenberg explained, there “is an interplay between nature and ourselves …which makes the sharp separation between the world and I impossible.”[8] Capra explains it this way: “the observer is not only necessary to observe the properties of an atomic phenomenon, but is necessary to even to bring about these properties …We can never speak about nature without, at the same time, speaking about ourselves.” And quantum physicist Nick Herbert proposed that there is ”a kind of ‘quantum animism’ in which mind permeates at every level.” He believes that “consciousness is a fundamental force that enters into necessary cooperation with matter to bring about the fine details of our everyday world.” [9]   

This reveals how fundamentally interconnected we are with the core of life: we cannot even observe it without being an intimate, deeply interwoven and participating part of it. As Capra declared, “Quantum theory thus reveals an essential interconnectedness of the universe.” Physicist David Bohm, who like Capra magnificently combined sage and scientist, wrote that this leads us “to a new notion of unbroken wholeness.” Theologian Matthew Fox recognized something profound in all of this when he observed, “Thus we see that matter itself contains the basic law of compassion: interconnectedness.” And Einstein declared that the “human being is part of a whole.” He stressed that we are deeply connected beings whose task is to widen “our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures…” We are thus interconnected by grand design, or as the early quantum physicist Sir James Jeans expressed it, “the universe seems to be nearer to a great thought than like a great machine.”[10] 

The Buddha understood the interconnectedness of reality when he taught the doctrine of “nonself.” Zen peace scholar and activist, Thich Nhat Hanh, describes nonself as the “reality” of “interbeing” and “the interconnectedness of all things.”[11]Peace scholar Michael Nagler says, “Nothing, not to mention no one, is separate from ‘us’ but is co-involved with our being.”[12] There is no such thing as detached passivity even when we think we are being detached and passive. Our consciousness, as will see, is always in play. There is only unity in the most profound sense, and unity, as our spiritual traditions and wise sages tell us, East and West, has always been a vital aspect of a living, flowing unconditional love that permeates all things.   

There is another incredible aspect of our existence which has only recently been verified in experimental conditions: that of non-locality. Non-locality has demonstrated that when two paired quantum particles are separated, no matter how far the distance, even from one side of the known universe to the other, they are instantly responsive to each other. Although you may have never heard of non-locality, it has been called the “most momentous” discovery in the “history of science”—more momentous than even Newton’s law of gravity or Einstein’s theory of relativity.[13]   

Before this, Einstein had established the ironclad rule which said that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light. Non-locality has violated this, but not by showing that information is traveling faster than the speed of light. Rather, there is an instantaneous responsiveness in the universe which transcends notions of time and space revealing an “undivided wholeness.” There is no distance to traverse, only a profound interconnectedness, a universal knowing, a sort of ESP-like aspect, which underlies our universe. And we are part of this “wholeness” not only because we live in this universe, but because we could not have discovered non-locality without observation, and as Heisenberg and the other fathers of quantum physics discovered, there is no separation between the observer and what is being observed.   

Interestingly, there is another strange but exciting aspect of the quantum world that confirms how uniquely and inseparably intertwined we are with the tissue of events that make up our reality—in this case, the past as well as the present. In what is known as the delayed choice experiment, we choose the outcome of a quantum experiment after it has already happened. Bizarre? No question! But like non-locality, this has been confirmed in the lab.[14] And in light of the instantaneous communication that is inherent in nature, this shows that conscious choice traverses time in some sense to influence the outcome of a quantum event in the past. This leads us to “say that we ourselves have an undeniable part in shaping what we have always called the past,” explained quantum physicist Jeffrey Wheeler.[15]   

All of this reminds me of a quote from Matthew Fox: “When the energy of love takes over, space and time are overcome.”[16] With that in mind, does non-locality and delayed choice suggest a hidden energy of love that underlies our universe, one in which we can access not only through experiment but through our minds and hearts to create miracles in our physical world, such as peace and coherence? The answer seems to point to a yes, as we will see in part five of this essay.   

TO SUM UP, we are deeply interwoven with a living universe that is responsive to all aspects of itself, which includes us. The universe appears to be a seamless whole where communication is shared in a way that transcends time and distance. Non-locality seems to reveal a universal knowing, a unity beneath all of the diversity, which we have traditionally attributed to an omniscient and omnipotent God, or a divine energy or source. And if “God is love” which “ties everything completely together,” then perhaps we can see this perfect communication at this deep level of the universe as perfect love where there are no barriers, only unimpeded flow, sharing, harmony, and exchange, together revealing the extraordinary movement—a movement that transcends time and distance—of love, or God, as the mysterious essence of the universe.   

One more thing: let me point out here that when talking about movement, I am not speaking of a linear movement. When we read in the story of Genesis that God said let there be light, and everything else, this perhaps comes closest to capturing the kind of movement that we are talking about here. It is an all-embracing and all-infusing and holistic movement that does not move as much as it informs. Perhaps we could imagine the Genesis story, or the beginning, a little differently, where not only did creation as we know it emerge, but also where the process of creation, this non-linear harmonious movement that transcends time and distance, was forever infused into our universe and our existence. (Or, if your prefer, the Big Bang Theory. Itzhak Bentov, a natural intuitive who combined physicist with mystic, offered a version where he imagined a “Creator” setting in motion the Big Bang and subsequently designing creation. See Chapter 10, “Some Reflections on the Creator,” in Stalking the Wild Pendulum). 

And then perhaps we could imagine that we, made in the image and likeness of God, as we are told—image and likeness meaning infused with divine-like potential as creators—have the ability to align ourselves with that process and can help shape our individual and collective destinies in a positive way, indeed far beyond what we have been taught. If we could begin to accept this, to integrate it into our thinking and worldview, what an impact that could have for our politics and global relationships, for living beings and the environment. To borrow from the economist and philosopher E.F. Schumacher, this could lead “to seeing the world in a new light, namely, as a place where the things modern man continuously talks about and always fail to accomplish can actually be done.”[17]

(For footnotes and suggested reading, click on the “Footnotes” icon located at the top of the webpage).   

 *This essay-proposal has been sent out to news sources nationally and globally, and printed at Huntington News Network, www.huntingtonnews.net.

NUCLEAR CATASTROPHE in Japan can be averted. But it may require that we not only take action now, but that we think outside of the box—far, far outside the box of conventional solutions and responses.

Perhaps nothing is more symbolic of the utter desperation in the midst of this tragedy than the frantic attempts to pump in sea water in hopes of cooling down the nuclear reactors at Fukushima Dai-ichi, and the brave souls who are sacrificing themselves inside the power plants working against all odds to contain the disaster. I pray it all helps. But at the time in which this essay is being written, reactor cores and fuel rods are getting hotter, explosions erupt and fires break out, and now all six reactors at Fukushima are in trouble. Even the most optimistic nuclear experts are bracing for problems not seen, or imagined, since the terrible catastrophe at Chernobyl in 1986.  

There is hope however. There is a way that may not only cool down the nuclear reactors, but that could also lower the levels of radiation that are being emitted within the Fukushima nuclear plant and outside in the surrounding communities.

I ask that you please keep your mind open and consider this essay-proposal. I think it could save precious lives and restore health to the environment. While it may sound strange and unorthodox at first, I will offer cutting-edge scientific and experimental evidence that will highlight the power we have right now to stop the meltdown and lower radiation levels.

What is it that may be able to do what our lack of disaster technology cannot? I am confident that the power of collective meditation, or focused human consciousness, could avert a potential disaster at Fukushima. Now please don’t sigh and roll your eyes, and toss aside this article. There are amazing precedents that support this idea. Keep on reading, and I believe you will be surprised and hopefully inspired.

The proof in the meditative pudding

THE POWER of focused human consciousness by way of meditation has demonstrably shaped and influenced certain aspects of our world—matter, crime rates, violent civil strife, and even terrorism—in experiment after experiment, study after study. In other words, we have proven the ability to shape reality through conscious intention. And the impact of these efforts in many cases, most of which have been subjected to rigorous examination and peer reviewed, has alleviated destructively violent episodes and conflicts as well as altered the structure and behavior of matter under controlled conditions.

Let us begin with the latter, altering the structure and behavior of matter, since that is what the collective meditation would essentially and most obviously be doing at Fukushima. Physicist and former chairman of the materials science department at Stanford University, Dr. William Tiller, along with his research team, has carried out a series of experiments to test human consciousness on matter under rigorously controlled conditions, as explained in his book, Conscious Acts of Creation: The Emergence of a New Physics.

Their first step was to create a core group of people trained in deep meditation with “decades of regular practice.” This group would then enter into a meditative state, or an “ordered mode of heart function,” as Tiller describes it, with the same goal in mind and from there they would send a specific intention to an electrical device which was shielded from any outside influences (strange, yes, but stay with me!) By imprinting a specific human intention on this device and placing the device close by a container of water, Tiller and company succeeded in moving the pH level in the water upwards and downwards by a large amount, precisely in accord with the imprinted intention. They also directly increased the thermodynamic activity of in vitro enzyme, and significantly lessened the development period for fruit fly larvae while increasing its vitality. Interestingly, once the imprinted intention device was removed from the area where the tests had occurred, the room was still conditioned to respond to the intention for up to a year in some cases.

This demonstrates the potential that such a meditative group has for lowering the temperature and cooling the nuclear reactors at Fukushima, and reducing radiation levels in the immediate and surrounding environment. Of course, there are clearly differences here, the most obvious being that the Tiller experiments were carried out in a lab under very close conditions, whereas lowering the temperature of nuclear reactors and reducing radiation levels would have to be done at some distance encompassing far larger areas, probably without the electrical device. But keep in mind what these experiments unquestionably demonstrate: the ability of focused human consciousness or intention to create, in the words of Dr. Tiller, “a robust effect in what we call physical reality.” He goes on to conclude that “consciousness-directed intention is a powerful force…”

Yet, still, could such a meditative group overcome or transcend the distance and area that would be critical for creating positive change in and around Fukushima? The answer appears to be a yes. And that brings us to the documented and peer reviewed studies where focused meditative groups have created peace and coherence, and have brought about qualitative improvements in chaotic and conflict ridden environments.

In his book, Permanent Peace, Robert Oates writes, “research indicates that the minds of people who are expert in meditation, when gathered together to meditate in one location, radiate harmony and peacefulness through an underlying field of consciousness.” In what was has been dubbed “the peace experiments,” Oates describes numerous examples of meditative groups using only their minds and hearts to reduce crime, warfare and terrorism. Interestingly, the documented results from these meditative assemblies, far from being fluff, have been subjected to rigorous scientific analysis and published in mainstream academic journals. “As unlikely as the premise may sound,” says Dr. Robert Gurr, Emeritus Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, “I think we have to take these studies seriously.”

One of the most impressive studies that Oates mentions is one based on Rand Corporation statistics, a well-respected think tank which took the results from a global meditative experiment through the scientific ringer. Oates writes that the Rand statistics demonstrate that “during the three largest Transcendental Meditation assemblies ever held in the West—near or exceeding 7,000 people at each assembly—terrorism declined worldwide by 72%.”  

Harvard-trained quantum physicist, John Hagelin, a leader and pioneer in the power of human consciousness, describes another impressive experiment in his book, A Manual for a Perfect Government. In August and September of 1983, during the Lebanese War, a group of study participants in Israel using a form of collective meditation (or deeply focused consciousness) succeeded in reducing war intensity by 34% and war deaths by 76%. The same studies were performed during the proceeding six-month period and then expanded to include a 27-month period, with even better results, including a “66% mean increase in level of cooperation among antagonists.” In addition to the group participants in Israel, these latter two studies included “assemblies” in Lebanon, Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, and the U.S. Again, each of these studies was performed using controlled scientific methods of analysis as well as being peer reviewed.

When we consider the measurable impact of focused human intention on matter as demonstrated in the Tiller experiments, and its impact on war and terrorism, as shown above, we have some powerful evidence that suggests that trained meditative groups may hold the potential for cooling down the nuclear reactors at Fukushima and reducing radiation levels. Here, as in the experiments that influenced matter and created peace, meditative groups would essentially be working with energy in a cooperative effort to create positive change. And as quantum physics has revealed, everything is energy.

The peace experiments also show that a meditative group—and it does not have to be a very large one—can radiate harmony and coherence not only over large distances, but can do so without even being near the vicinity they are focused upon. And when we consider that human consciousness can indeed influence matter, it is not a far leap to make to imagine a trained meditative group cooling down those reactors from anywhere in the world without ever going near the Fukushima nuclear power plant.   

This may make more sense when we consider a few things. First, there is no distance to traverse when our minds are in a deep meditative state. Theologian Matthew Fox points out that “the suspension of time and motion …is what occurs when a person is in a deep meditative state.” Futurist Kay Massengale writes that “the practice of meditation allows one to perceive the whole,” and she goes on to quote physician Deepak Chopra, who explains that in meditation we ”bypass the limited, bounded choices that we are used to making and go directly to the solution of any problem.”

Next, in quantum physics, there has been a fairly recent discovery called non-locality, hailed by some as the “most momentous discovery in the history of science,” which has shown that there is an instantaneous communication or responsiveness at the deepest levels of existence which transcends distance, space and time. This may help us to begin to understand how deep meditation, or focused human consciousness, can impact matter and chaotic environments in the above experiments: it simply operates at a much deeper level of being where time and distance cease to exist. “To put the hypothesis compactly,” explains Oates, “the human mind can bring peace (or stability) to the world, because it is one with the world.”

Kay Massengale, who is writing a book based on her thirty years of studying the relationship between consciousness and matter, told me in an interview today how we might understand and visualize what meditative efforts would be doing at Fukushima. She says that what we have to realize is that we would not be forcing anything to happen. We are simply using human intention in a cooperative effort to guide atomic energy into what we want to happen. Massengale explains that we “only need to supply a blueprint (via meditation) of our goal, and the energy can coalesce into a physical manifestation of that mental blueprint provided by the meditative group.”        

However focused human intention works, what we know for certain is that it does work. And at Fukushima, and for the country of Japan, every hour and every minute at this point is crucial. We have nothing to lose by giving this unorthodox approach a try, and everything to gain if it works in cooling down the nuclear reactors. We also have the incredible opportunity here to witness the emergence of a new (though old) human technology greater than anything we have ever discovered outside of ourselves: the focused power of our hearts and minds, which, interestingly enough, our sages and spiritual traditions have always pointed us toward. The implications could be enormous for our future and how we maintain and use energy.

But the people of Japan are waiting and praying right now. Time is truly of the essence as reactors get hotter and radiation spews into the atmosphere. We must transcend our traditional approaches to problems and solutions that alone may not work, and really think outside of the box and do what could work. We need experienced experts like Dr. John Hagelin to create and guide meditative groups that could help transform Fukushima, and save lives and the environment. We need to act now!

The predicament of Western man …is a failure to develop wisdom proportionate to power …Wisdom must be in proportion to power if power is to be used wisely. All the evidence seems to indicate that the wisdom of the majority of people in Western culture has not been increasing as rapidly as the gigantic increase in power which they have acquired …Wisdom in this context is the understanding of other minds and of one’s own mind in such a way that one knows what are his basic needs, the needs of others, and the most important needs of human kind.

                                                               Henry Nelson Wieman, theologian, 1958.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

                                                                                                                    Dwight D. Eisenhower

TO READ an original historical interpretation of how our beliefs and historical events have shaped the way we negatively view human nature, along with our selfish politics and global behavior, which we have mistakenly taken to be a truism or fixed reality beyond our own making, click on the above Appendix icon, or go to http://goldenruleforeignpolicy.com/wp-admin/page.php?action=edit&post=699&message=1

DURING THE PAST WEEK the violent death of Osama bin Laden has been celebrated with what can only be described as rapturous delight. We feel that this “terrorist” has finally gotten what he deserves, and revenge has never felt so good. But who was this Osama bin Laden? Who was he really?  

He was (and is) us. And we are Osama bin Laden. 

We Americans are Osama bin Laden because he emerged from our own fears and greed, from the misunderstanding and lack of compassion and insight in our own hearts. We were in his land long before 9-11, the greatest superpower on the face of the earth with the most powerful weapons in the world. Beginning in 1953, driven by our fear and greed, we helped to overthrow the democratic leader of Iran, and from there we spent more than a half-century manipulating Middle Eastern peoples, interfering with their right to self-determination, which finally ignited the raw anger of people like Osama bin Laden. 

During the early-1980s, rather than creatively pursuing peaceful resolution to the war between the Afghans and Russians, we instead gave Osama bin Laden and the Afghans weapons, resources and military training in hopes that they would brutally humiliate our then number one enemy, the Soviet Union, which they did and which we still celebrate to this day (i.e. Charlie Wilson’s War).  

Indeed, we nurtured violence for many years and that violence finally came back to our own doorstep on 9-11. If we really understood how things worked—the universal truth behind the old adage that violence begets violence—we would not be surprised in the least that we simply got back what we put out, as will always be the case. 

We believe that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda brought down the World Trade Towers on that unforgettable September day. But the truth is that they did not act alone; we also hijacked those planes and flew them into the Towers. Long before that day, we hijacked the highest aspects of ourselves—compassion, insight and empathy—and replaced them with some of our lowest and most uncreative aspects. Thus, the men on those planes were only the distorted manifestation of the distortion in our own minds and hearts. They carried with them our own fears and misunderstanding, and that is what really guided those planes toward that tragic end, creating so much death and suffering. 

We Americans are Osama bin Laden because he mirrored back to us our utter unwillingness to make even the slightest attempt to be introspective and to examine our above role in all of this. He saw us as the mortal enemy, as we saw him as our mortal enemy. He saw his people as the victims, and we saw our own as the victims. He fervently believed that we did something terribly immoral, and we believed that he did something terribly immoral. He desperately wanted revenge, and we desperately wanted revenge. 

We Americans are Osama bin Laden because we refused to see his humanity, as he refused to see ours. Together we were joined by a bond of violence and misunderstanding, yet we could not even see this negative connection much less imagine the deep interconnection that we shared as human beings and children of God.  

Finally, we are Osama bin Laden because by killing him and celebrating his murder we are further killing our chances for honest dialogue and understanding, which got us into this mess in the first place. Here we are reinforcing our own moral superiority and his moral inferiority, declaring with righteous hatred that he alone was responsible for our woes. If he is a terrorist for his one day of tragic violence, then what do we call ourselves for the nine years of continuous violence and suffering that we have brought to Afghanistan? The greatest tragedy, then, is that without honest dialogue and collective introspection we are taken further away from the only thing that could help us—the only thing that could bring us closer to our own responsibility for 9-11—the one thing that could potentially reduce terrorism and create a better world: us—with humility and compassion—us.           

So who will be our next mortal enemy, the dark symbol of evil who we can conveniently contrast with our shining symbol of good?           

If we could only look in the mirror honestly we would see that it will always be an Osama bin Laden, and that our greatest enemy is always us. What incredible, creative freedom we would have if we could ever get there.

*Note: below are the first two pages, along with additional excerpts, of a talk that I will be sharing in-person in traditional and non-traditional forums. Much of it integrates the past year of essays here at NPF and our vision.

IN THE WORDS of theologian Matthew Fox, “we now possess the know-how to feed the world and provide basics for all its citizens.” And the economist E.F. Schumacher has explained that the “generosity of the Earth allows us to feed all mankind; we know enough about ecology to keep the Earth a healthy place; there is enough room on the Earth, and there are enough materials so that everybody can have adequate shelter.” Schumacher goes on to stress that “we are quite competent enough to produce sufficient supplies of necessities so that no one need live in misery.”

Without a doubt, I believe that both Fox and Schumacher are correct. We indeed have the resources and creativity, the brainpower and heart-power, to find long-term solutions to world hunger and thirst, to sickness and disease, to war and conflict. We have the potential to alleviate suffering on a scale that we rarely allow ourselves to imagine, and to help others—and ourselves—live more qualitative lives. It is definitely within our grasp.  

If this is true, why aren’t we doing it? Well, to some degree we are doing it. We have thousands of committed, hardworking humanitarian, human rights, environmental and peace organizations and groups making a significant difference all over the world for so many people, the environment and animals. Today we have more organizations and efforts working to make the world a better place than at anytime in history.

Yet—hunger and thirst are still rampant, and by most statistics it appears that both are getting worse for millions of people, including children who according to the U.N are suffering and dying at a rate of at least 18,000 a day; half the world’s children live in extreme deprivation due to war, HIV and AIDS; conflicts still rage across the globe; and misunderstanding, chaos and distortion between cultures, religions and peoples seems to be ever so prevalent.

So why, with all of these amazing efforts, with such enormous material and human resources at our disposal, including unlimited creativity, why do things seem to be getting worse, or at least not getting much better?

Because, I believe we are not using our full collective power and human potential. We are a house divided, to borrow a famous indictment from Abraham Lincoln in which he lamented the division and diminishment of the human potential of his time. The greatest concentration of the collective power that we have here in the U.S., which includes energy, resources, and creativity, is locked away in our political institutions, and for the most part that power is used for purposes quite different from those devoted to improving lives and the planet. Indeed, the greatest part of this tremendous power is used to create technology and strategies to destroy, dominate and manipulate, rather than finding long-term solutions for our global neighbors who lack the basic necessities of life, and who have no government services to help them cope. Our total military and defense budget is now approaching a trillion dollars annually, which includes using our greatest collective focus and resources on an unprecedented scale for the destruction of life, and in efforts to control other peoples and nations in the name of National Security.

Compare these trillion dollars to the money we give to U.S. humanitarian assistance which accounts for less than 30 billion dollars annually and which always lacks the will, focus and commitment that are devoted to military and defense spending. When we break this down by percentage it roughly amounts to over 50 percent of our national budget being spent on military and defense, compared to less than one percent for humanitarian efforts. Indeed, the U.S. ranks last among the twenty-two developed countries in the amount of overseas development assistance it provides as a percentage of GDP, while our military spending skyrockets past every other country in the world. Is it really any wonder that there is so much global anxiety and unrest?   

Thus, when we compare this incredible political power with that of humanitarian-type organizations, the latter appears as desperate marginal efforts doing the best they can with a few meager crumbs. So we are a house divided, which is really a misnomer, as house divided presupposes at least some sense of proportion on both sides. However, the balance of power is overwhelmingly in favor of power to harm, to destroy, to create instability, or at best to simply do little to alleviate suffering when we could do so much to help. As President Dwight Eisenhower stressed, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

I cannot see how we will ever find long-term solutions to global problems, to really alleviate suffering, to achieve more peace, to create a healthier environment, all to help others live happier, freer and more qualitative lives, until that power imbalance changes—until we can begin to transform our political institutions from focusing only on the promotion of national interests to also serving the welfare of our global neighbors with our enormous human and material resources. Or to put it more bluntly, until we are able to shift political power away from death and in the direction of life, our noble humanitarian efforts will continue to only achieve band-aid solutions, doing little to significantly stem the rampant tide of hunger and poverty, conflicts and wars, and environmental degradation.

However, once that power imbalance changes—and I believe it can—we will create miracles which were once sworn to be impossible. Imagine, for a moment, relief organizations and government power harmoniously merging together, bringing to bare unlimited energy, technology, resources, experience and creativity—the best of human ingenuity and the best in the human heart—to significantly reduce, for example, hunger and thirst in the Horn of Africa. With such a collective, mega-focus—the focus we now give to military operations and strategies—we could begin to end  hunger and thirst there in thirty days! And I believe we could lay the groundwork for peace and sustainability!

THE PRESSING QUESTION, then, is how can we begin to transform political power so that we can release and channel our incredible collective energy and creativity for the welfare of others and our planet, which is so desperately needed in our world today? 

This is bound to be a tough one for most of us. We have been schooled in the popular belief that power and politics are somehow what they are—a separate entity of sorts—outside of ourselves, independent of our own creation and not very comprehensible. Worse, we have been conditioned to see power and politics as intrinsically negative and corrupt…

…we may be tempted to think that by activating and nurturing the highest aspects of ourselves, and by trying to bring that into our politics and global relationships, we somehow violate the intrinsic and natural order of a dog-eat-dog world, or nature, and because of that our transformation is doomed to failure. My response to that is, are you sure? Modern science, experiments, historical precedents and the best of our spiritual traditions all tell us a different story, one that takes us far away from a struggle and war in nature, to one that emphasizes cooperation and harmony…

…we now have overwhelming evidence which demonstrates that positive emotions and mindsets, such as love, compassion and forgiveness, are strongly connected to good physical health and well being, while negative ones undermine physical health and contribute to sickness. This works the same for the health of nations and the international community as it does for the physical health of people. When we bring fear, greed and suspicion into our global relationships we get a world sick with conflict, war and the inability to cope with pressing global problems. But when we instead bring into those relationships trust, insight and compassion, we create healthier relationships and a more peaceful and cooperative atmosphere, as we will sees shortly in several examples and precedents…

…it was our Founding Fathers, particularly Thomas Jefferson, who understood the importance of not locking people into one set of political principles for all time, as he was keenly aware that as we grew and changed, as people became “more enlightened, as new discoveries were made, new truths disclosed,” and as our conditions changed, we would need to revise or expand upon our political arrangements. He feared that if the foundation that he and the other founders had laid ever became fixed and unalterable, there would be problems. Jefferson warned that “we might as well require a man to wear the coat which fitted him as a boy,” as to require “a civilized society to remain under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”   

So government here in the U.S. should be what we the people, ever evolving and progressing, say it is as it best serves our desires as we grow, and we have the power by design—a design which includes growth and movement—to use that collective power to accomplish amazing things, rather than allowing that power to be stripped from us in the name of national security, and used in a way that we would in any other context consider utterly immoral. This approach does not fit the needs of humanity and our world today. We are quickly outgrowing that old, restrictive jacket of force and distortion. Indeed, it never looked very good on us in the first place. Leaving all of the bureaucracy and political baggage aside, then, we are the government, and the government is us. It cannot exist without we the people. That is what democracy is about—the demos, or people. We just need to compassionately and creatively reclaim it and expand upon it qualitatively.

And I would stress that by moving towards a more humanitarian or benign conception and use of political power, we are moving further along our historical path to a greater fulfillment of democracy—a government of the people for the people that assures our greatest welfare and happiness and freedom, and not just for our own country, but for others who because of intense suffering, and with no government services to help them cope, are unable alone to achieve a qualitative existence…

…by activating the highest aspect of ourselves, by bringing into our politics and global relationships creative compassion, wisdom, insight and ingenuity, I believe that we would be laying the foundation for a different world, indeed a different civilization economically and politically. In answering pressing human needs, we would be building relationships of trust, of compassion, of cooperation, and of understanding, which could improve our lives exponentially in every way. We would have more peace, and enjoy our lives at a greater qualitative level. And, ultimately, it is only through such qualitative shift within our hearts, an inner transformation of universal love and the courage to act upon that love and transcend our fears and limitations, that we will be able to set free our creativity for finding solutions to global problems. Once we do, our kindness and service will be reflected back to us in the world. What better national security?

But we must first resist the easy temptation to believe that reality is just the way it is, outside of our own creative power, and instead nurture the belief, within ourselves, within our political and collective discourse, that all of this is not only possible, but practical. Indeed, what could be more practical than addressing our global problems and needs?     

Perhaps the world does not work the way that we have always been taught and conditioned to believe. Maybe the best of our spiritual traditions, along with modern science and experiments, and the peaceful historical precedents, are all right: that is, as we believe so we become; and as we become so becomes our world. Maybe we matter—and are empowered—far more than most of us realize.

IN THE twenty-five minutes that it is has taken me to give this talk, at least 500 men, women, and children, infants and the elderly—at least 500 of our fellow human beings—have died from starvation, just in this short time. By the time you get up for breakfast in the morning, starvation will have claimed another 10,000 or more human lives. That’s more than 20,000 people everyday dying from hunger.[i] In the twenty-five minutes that it has taken me to give this talk, almost 100 children under the age of five have died from drinking contaminated water. That’s more than 4,000 children dying from polluted water each day.[ii] In the twenty-five minutes that it has taken me to give this talk more than 60 children have died of malaria, a preventable disease. That’s over 3000 children a day, or over a million children dying from malaria each year.[iii] In the twenty-five minutes it has taken me to give this talk, millions and millions of men, women and children have become worse off due to a lack of peace and stability in their war-torn and famine-stricken countries, and from lacking the bare necessities to cope and survive. And the clock keeps ticking.

And as the clock ticks, in the twenty-five minutes that it has taken me to give this talk, if we converted military and defense spending into minutes, we Americans have spent almost 50 million dollars not on creative efforts to help our suffering neighbors, but rather on the design, production and use of cold, impersonal, deadly weapons that have no other purpose but to destroy. By the time you get up tomorrow morning, we will have committed another 1 billion dollars to these weapons and their use. Listen again to President Eisenhower’s words: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Lastly, in the twenty-five minutes that it has taken me to give this talk, we Americans have wasted at least 1,500 tons of food, which each year adds up to 30 million tons of food thrown away[iv]—thrown away, while our neighbors starve and as our food banks struggle to meet increasing needs.

The U.S. can no longer afford be a house divided. Without a doubt, as Matthew Fox reminds us, “we now possess the know-how to feed the world and provide basics for all its citizens.” We have it within our power to help, to transform our institutions into human institutions answering human needs, as do the other privileged nations of the world, no question. No question. What will we do?