It's Trimboli pleased and honored to be speaking to you I've had
a long term relationship with the Fellowship of Reconciliation partly because we
both have this intense interest in spiritual nonviolence and as you may be
aware. Two thousand. And I put on the spiritual activism
conference in Berkeley Fourteen hundred people came to and there was considered to
be
a really big launch. At that event I told the following story to Jim Forrest when he
was the head of I.F.O.R.
In. This part of the sound and light show.
Jim was he came back from international peace meeting in Italy and he was kind of
shaken and I said Jim and he said Well I finally figured out the purpose of the
peace movement I said For heaven's sakes tell me you know I've been doing this now
for a quarter of
a century what are we here for and he said the purpose of the peace movement is to
take the angriest people in the world and keep them out of the military.
And. Really I was so pleased with for that I did do
a pilgrimage when I was in Kowloon Germany about eight years ago I went to the
railway station and I went to
a famous bunch to. Track seven and stood there where Mr Hodgkinson
Mr secretly chilled had done the famous handshake that started this August
organisation
a hundred years ago and I'm also pleased to say that it was
for the published. First version of this book it was called steps of nonviolence
it wasn't nearly as handsome as it is now and I want to say
a little bit about it because once I get started with my talk I forget to do the
advertisements. With the word from our sponsor. And this book
is sure to which is
a great advantage it's inexpensive which is an incredible advantage and it
represents the distillation of everything that I've been able to kind of put
together about the basic strategies of nonviolence in my whole you know career of
working on this so intensely the reason for this book really came about in June of
one thousand nine hundred eighty nine when the terrible massacre of students took
place in Tiananmen Square I was sitting with some colleagues and we knew that they
were making some mistakes and we knew that they were endangering their lives and
there was nothing we can do about it there was no internet at that time we had to
sit there and watch the tanks roll in and kill all of the.
Story and kill all of those young people and I was so active professor at the time
students who were and still are very dear to me and the incredible frustration of
knowing that we could have helped if only we had somehow been able to reach them as
led to this lifelong search to distill the best practices of nonviolence in the
motto of the medicine tr is to help people practice nonviolence more safely and
more effectively. So we sat let me launch into my talk I feel
a little bit like Richard Nixon. You know Anyway he he once got
a sense I know I don't look like him here. But he once got up he said before I give
my speech I'd like to say something I.
So there I said it in there let me begin my speech I really don't have much of an
excuse for showing this beautiful little full on. But I have to I was
asked to give a TED X.
Talk on the subject that we're going to be talking about today the new story where
does it come from the central idea of nonviolence and I had to reduce everything
I've been working on for the last thirty years into eighteen minutes how am I going
to do this I looked out the window and there was a dove acting
a little strangely and I walked over and sure enough this little guy just been born
and so inspired me and I thought it might put us all in the right mood for this
talk. Well let me begin with
a story how many of you know who this lady is we should we should all know this
woman and we should know the story is name is Antoinette Tuff she's with
proximately the most appropriately named human being the planet she was
a book keeper in a school with about eight hundred students in Decatur Georgia
a very deranged young man who was off his psycho tropic medicines came into
the school with very heavy weapons assault rifles and so forth well the stuff which
is so easy to come by in this country and planning mayhem he snuck through
the security door and he was confronted by Antoinette who looked at him
and said. Gee I'm so sorry you you really look troubled I have troubles too you
want to hear about my recent divorce you know everyone has to go through trouble in
this life and I think you're going to be fine I think you're going to make it and I
love you she said and she gradually talked him down. And told him
please why don't you put your weapons up here on my desk so he did and he said.
Live down and tell me when you're ready and I'll call the police. Which he
did he he lay down put his hands behind his back and she called
a SWAT team which was standing outside and they came running and you can actually
hear the nine eleven tapes where they come in making absolute ass of themselves All
right everybody get down here which he's already done so she became
a hero and she's writing
a book that's what heroes do professors also right. Now
this story was covered in the newspapers but the meaning of it was not and so this
is part of what we're doing at medicine or we've recently trained thirteen hundred
young people in South Africa to interpret news and to make their own news so that
the meaning of these stories gets out the meaning of the story is in my humble
opinion. We had two security systems in place at that school that morning
one was
a very expensive system that failed that system consisted of an electronic security
gate and
a SWAT team. The SWAT team actually made matters worse when they showed up and
started shouting and firing outside they almost destroyed what Antoinette Tuff was
doing. The other. Security system was Antoinette
a human being who was trained to recognize another suffering human being she had
a minister who had told her given her
a grounding technique at that helped her do this and it the story if you
ask me is that we're spending millions and millions of dollars on
a failed system and we're doing nothing to develop an appropriate system beautiful
system which worked to give you another story really quickly this was in
a Walgreens parking lot. Two years ago I think it was an elderly woman
a little bit disabled got into her car and
a young man jumped into the car and pointed
a gun at her and said Give me all your money. She said young man. Jesus is with
me in this car. If you shoot me I'm going straight to heaven and you're going
straight to hell. And the conversation continued
a little while longer and finally the fellow started crying which is actually
fairly common in these cognitive dissonance situations that are caused by
nonviolence actors he started crying and he put the gun away and started to get out
of the car she said Wait
a minute young man had reached in her wallet and gave him all the money she had.
Ten dollars or something and again the story was reported but the meaning was lost
the point of the story was that this woman who had not had the opportunity to take
my course as far as I know she. And incidentally when that that course was
seven shows you what kind of hunger there is for nonviolence when their course went
up on line in the first six months or more than one hundred thousand people had
Washoe and say they watched the whole course but they had tuned into it and it's
still available on our website and actually in August we're going to do the course
again but this time not at the university Oh no we're going to do it at the
medicine tr and webcast it from there so I love teaching but I hate the University
. But where we are this is
a terrific cliffhanger waiting to hear the meaning of the story of Lady she as I
say she had not taken my course but she did the perfect nonviolent thing
spontaneously again it shows we have this capacity within us in fact the more I
deal with nonviolence the more I've begun to realize that it really is only become
clear for me in the last few years that nonviolence is the absolute core of what we
are as human beings so she had this spontaneous where news and ability.
And what she did if we can only have somebody interpret it for us which he did was
she absolutely refused to accept the model of reality that this young man was
offering her namely he was saying we are radically separate my happiness can be
built on your suffering. And she was saying absolutely not we are radically
connected your happiness and mine are united they are interconnected and I'm happy
to help you but not under coercion not accepting that model of separateness but
affirming the model of connectedness. So if we ask ourselves
why the journalism is so bad if you're OK We're not going to be so terrifically
surprised as this I had a student of mine at Berkeley who became
a journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle and she told me that their motto is If
it's news it's news to us.
But there is
a deeper reason behind all of this and that the reported is. Lacking
I guess is the word I'm looking for because we're living in the wrong story we're
living in
a story of reality which says that the world consists of matter and because it
consists of matter it consists of limited resources and because we also consist of
matter we are radically separate from one another and we are doomed to compete for
those ever scarcer resources and therefore the devastation of the planet and war
and the economic imbalance and all the rest of it all comes from this wrong story
and there are people who have begun to realize that it's the story that's the
problem they've been working on getting a new story. This is
a quote from one of those people Thomas Barry.
Obviously going through the deep crisis of the kind that Barry describes where our
story is inadequate for the present situation in fact I would say that it's worse
than inadequate it's devastatingly misleading this story of materialism and
separate and it's not hard at all to tell where that story is coming from this is
an advertisement I picked almost at random see this young dude in the sports car
here I'm trying not to be jealous he had
a nice just look at the look on his face he's got the look of an action hero and
he's driving some kind of very slick car I've cut out the brand name of the car so
I won't be sued. And you can see the exciting thing about this is that his heart
beat is matching the engine R.P.M.
And just in case you don't get the point don't just drive the car be the car.
Be a machine and lest you think that this is just
a one off according to recent studies we're exposed to somewhere between three and
five thousand commercial messages
a day. Be it be less than one thousand in c back Washington more than six
thousand in Tokyo but somewhere in between most of us see three or so thousand
messages
a day that are telling us we are empty we are separate from one another we need to
compete we need to buy more stuff and so on and so forth so that's where what we
call the old story is coming from now you might have noticed I put quote marks
around old story because really it's fairly new it started in the industrial
revolution which in in geological times was just an eyeblink ago.
The new story is him and intimately bound up with nonviolence. Again I
don't have much of an excuse for showing this picture of it here's what Luther King
being
a very human human being with his family and it was he who said we must rapidly
begin the shift from
a thing oriented civilization which is what we have become primarily through the
advertising mode ality of the mass media to
a person oriented civilization and as I say I've noticed over and over again
recently how personhood is identified with the capacity for nonviolence recently
Christian Peacemaker Teams was talking with and Kurdish activists in Iraqi
Kurdistan who said he wanted to mount a major nonviolent campaign the C.P.T.
Person said you know I guess he wasn't as well trained as F.
Or it seems or he said yes you can do that but you know it's difficult
which is true it's devolve some risk which is true it takes longer which isn't
true we just discovered that it's about
a third the time if you do things through nonviolence but they didn't know that and
the Kurdish gentleman said yes all of that is true I know it's going to be more
difficult more risky take more time but he said you don't lose your humanity in the
process. And while he was saying that we were recently passing that barrier
that landmark where more American servicemen and women have committed suicide then
have been killed in combat. And again we are clueless as to the reason oh my gosh
they must be under stress or something like that. Like we're not under stress Come
on no the reason is that a friend of mine
a psychologist named Mary McNair some of you may know as discovered
a concept called perpetration induced traumatic stress it's the pits
perpetration duce dramatic stress and it's States that we are much more devastated
by what we what we do to other people than what other people do to us and it's
taken us as the army will refuse to acknowledge that this phenomenon exists because
it puts them in an impossible quandary we ought to be shaking it in their face
every time we get
a chance look at what we're doing with basic training is basic dehumanization.
So where are we going to go for quote a new story actually this is
a fairly easy question to ask because the new story has been around forever if you
will and we even have
a name these days for the tradition that it comes from it's called the wisdom
tradition. And if you need turn
a little inheritance that every one of us can claim it's the vision
of these great sages and mystics and this is just one testimony from an anonymous
document from the fourteenth century England called the Cloud of Unknowing beneath
you and external to you that's an important point external to you lies the entire
created universe even the sun moon and stars they cannot compare to your
exalted dignity as
a human being. So this is the stories that we need and just to show you that it's
not only an ancient story this is
a statement very fairly recently from an Indian sage Swami who actually came to
this country in the one nine hundred fifty S.
In order to help us not have the third world war. This is this is really
such an important summary of who we are that I'd like to dwell on it for just
a minute on the physical plane man is but an animal OK let me stop here for
a second I've had
a couple of conversations with very prominent creative brilliant people
much more successful in their fields well then I am for example
one of them is
a well known economist who runs or organization in Bainbridge Island not far from
here No names please. The other. Is
a colleague of mine from Berkeley he was a very very well known linguist in
a lot of books and they have both said to me new story conferences and we're trying
to get this this quote ancient news story out they both said well look we are
animals. And. Fortunately I mean nonviolent person and I
would have wanted to shake them up except one of them at least is much bigger
than me so I didn't try to shake him and say our bodies are the bodies of
animals but we are mind body and spirit and when you just keep saying we're animals
you are saying they were back in the old paradigm which is to say they were
physical beings trapped in this competition for scarce resources etc etc but look
how much further around us will go. The intellectual plane the human being she or
he is a rational being that's that's nice you know I made my living that way for
a number of years people would ask me or Professor what do you do and I said well I
take simple ideas and make them complicated enough so that intellectuals can
understand. You know you can make
a living at anything my grandmother used to say. On the moral plane we
are
a power for good and he goes even further than that on the spiritual plane we are
radiant being full of divine light love and bliss and he goes on to add that we are
not finished yet humanity's ascent from one plane to another is its natural
movement. So this is the quote new story it's already there it's in every
imaginable language and all kinds of different mediums and images the problem is
that we don't believe it so we need we need to do two things we need
and this is going to this is
a kind of mnemonic it can be easy for us to remember this we need to adapt and
adopt we need to adapt the old story and put it into
a language that we can assimilate we modern people for whom as my friend Willis
Harmon used to say science is the knowledge validating system for us.
In the US we belong to the Tea Party and we know but if you don't think
that Jesus rode into Jerusalem monitoring
a serious wrecks. You mostly believe in science and if something cannot be
validated by science it we're going to have
a hard time accepting it so we need to adapt it to
a language we can understand and then which is an even harder part we need to adopt
it we need to make it the worldview through which most people see the world so that
when and Antoinette Tuff does which he does we can interpret that we can understand
it we can build upon it we can institutionalize it and then in our problems will be
over. So. It just so happens unless he you believe in God In which
case you would say by God's grace we have just the two things that we need
to do the ad and the adopting to do the adapting we have this incredible
revolution in science that's taken place in about the last thirty thirty five years
and to do the adopting to make the new story real to make it how we see the world
that's where nonviolence comes in because three years I've been saying that the new
science and the new story are helping us to establish and explain nonviolence
but it's also the other way around that the fact that nonviolence works shows that
we must be having the wrong image of the human being if we were just material
objects separate from one another etc etc on that animal plane there is no way to
explain why nonviolence is so effective so I want to talk just
a little bit about what the new science is and some of the newest developments in.
Nonviolence which mostly you're probably aware of. I've got
a few experiments I'd like to tell you about. Incidentally we're trying to
build
a page on the medicine or website which will summarize some of the most important
findings of the new science because it's extremely valuable resource but one of the
best researchers from steel wall is
a Dutch primate ologist he wrote
a book called chimpanzee politics which I thought was
a description of the White House but actually. Description of his chimpanzee is
that the our names do and they did the following experiment they had
a colony of rhesus monkeys know rhesus monkeys are pretty aggressive critters as
you can see from this picture of course I've chosen the picture to show this but
never mind. Here's another I think I recognize this one.
I missed this one in Brooklyn. So they had these really aggressive
monkeys and they introduced that's going to sound
a little bit on car and. They introduced Stumptail monkeys much more
like F.
Or monkeys. You can see there
they love their kids they're kind and gentle and the their fear was that you know
the rhesus monkey is just going to wipe up the cages with his stump tails Well the
first of three big surprises was that the stump tails actually prevailed
rhesus monkey would kind of come up to
a stump to say. Get off of my branch. Would
say I'm not leaving I was here first if you have
a real problem you can run it by my finger guide. But I'm not getting off the
branch you know nonviolence one o one and in
a short period of time to the amazement of the researchers the stump tails have
established themselves and refuse to be cowed down by the quote more aggressive
rhesus monkeys then. This is incredible the rhesus monkeys actually
started imitating the stump tails so Stumptail culture prison in their
cultural nonviolence right Stumptail culture prevailed over Reese's culture and
they thought wow this is incredible We're going to get at least three Ph D.'s out
of this. Now let's pull the stump tails out and see how long it takes for the
rhesus to go back to their bad old ways so they took pull all the stump tails out
and the rhesus monkeys are still being Stumptail like the last we heard so
peace culture is not only more potent but more robust the nonviolent violent
culture and this is also been shown from games theory and many other places on
mention just one of their experiments just to get show you the how this is opening
up new vistas. The fact is that if you sit in front of
a computer screen and they flash a face on that screen and that face is
a person from a different race you're limbic system will get activated That's
a system way down in the animal brain in the reptilian brain actually and as
a little almond shaped entity in there call the image the Lloyd nucleus and when it
fires up you go into
a fight or flight response so this is an unfortunate fact of evolutionary
life for I am sitting in front of a screen they show me
a picture of someone that I don't know from
a different race the image. Gets hyperactive. You know the two researchers at
Princeton who probably not by coincidence were two women Mary Wheeler and Susan
Fiske decided there's got to be
a way around this and they thought of something that was incredibly brilliant and
I'm surprised that as professors they were able to come up with something so simple
and. You were there was this they said to the subject OK this is
a test we want to test your accusation here we want you to tell us does this person
like crunchy peanut butter or smooth peanut butter. And credibly stupid question
and they said they would do this over and over again and you know what it
completely suppressed the response it went that deep it went back
three hundred million years in evolution and and stifle that response and the
explanation for this is is pretty simple when you ask yourself
a question like that you're looking at the person as
a human being as an individual not as a member of
a threat category other than me different compete so forth so once again changing
to
a human person oriented civilization in this process incidentally is what psychologists
call priming you prime the subject with
a particular question change his or her mental set and that changes the result of
the experiments and so you might look at advertising as incredibly bad priming that
we're giving ourselves on
a social level. So. I guess I don't need to say much more about
that particular experiment but there are incredible results now coming
in in many many fields to the point where we have new fields of science
altogether positive psychology and so forth and I. I would really urge that all of
us become familiar with this because it's extremely useful material if you haven't
guessed by now I My purpose here today is to recruit you into the new storytellers
this is the one of the ways that we're going to do it so. Let's go over now to
the nonviolence side of the equation and ask ourselves what's what's new since
Gandhi in King in other words roughly contemporaneous with this explosion of
positive science in the last thirty thirty five years the discovery of mirror
neurons and all of those things. The same time parallel discoveries are going on in
nonviolence first of all there's an enormous quantitative spread of nonviolence as
all of us in this room know very well because Walter wink and Richard Dietz wrote
about it in pieces of the way and in fellowship magazine there was
a very important article called the global spread of active nonviolence which
showed that if you just do population counts slightly more than half the world at
that time had experienced
a major nonviolent event or campaign of some kind many of which had been
successful even by worldly standards but in this book I argue that we need
a different set of criteria to discover to evaluate whether something is successful
or not but even by worldly standards most of them succeeded and that was written
before our of spring so I used to go around saying by now it's probably two thirds
of the world and just last week I read an article by Jack Duvall from the
International Center for now and found conflict saying there is hardly And he is
not. Magic Jack to volley you know him he's not
a resists but he's not. A sop either. He said there is
hardly
a society in the world today that has not experienced some kind of at least strategic
non violent episodes so it's everywhere the term is coming up though
not as much as we might like in Petaluma when I was starting to look around for the
Met Office I went into a lawyers office and they had
a room to spare and they weren't paying much attention to me and I just walked into
the room I looked at it came out as I was walking out. And behind the desk said so
what do you do what do you want this office where I said well we have
a nonprofit she said That's nice still looking down at her paper. What do you do
there say well we promote nonviolence to what. What what kind of
violence. So we're
really not quite there yet but the phenomenon. At least is growing and
there are at least five qualitative things that are different and helpful the
first is that there's an enormous amount of research not just the new science
research that I was just referring to but I'm sure most of you are familiar with
this book by Erica Chenowith and Maria Stephan documenting that of
almost three hundred with
a call transitions to democracy we used to call them revolutions but now
transitions to democracy fifty six percent of the nonviolent ones were
successful and twenty three percent of the violent ones were successful so we
are now starting to ground this scientifically more important than that I believe
as
a frustrated activist is the phenomenon of transmission. Read any book from the seventy's
eighty's about the pieces. Movement and they will tell you the problem with the
peace movement is that it has to reinvent the wheel every time there's an event
because there's no way of learning from one event to the next that is now changing
and for example there's an organization called Center for Advanced nonviolent
actions and strategies which took the successful student led uprising leaders from
Serbia from the year two thousand and have them bundle up with they had learned and
make that
a fail they were in Egypt they were they were I think they were even some of them
in Iran there's some difficulties with that organization but the fact is we're now
beginning to realize that this is
a human capacity. We are all potential Antoinette Tuff so human capacity
and we can learn it and develop it and so this is
a really big breakthrough. There are also new institutions which again you know
about as well as I. Here are two fellows Derek Oakley from the U.K.
And Andreas Gutierrez from Central America are part of nonviolent peace force team
in jungle a state in South Sudan
a they don't pick easy conflicts to go into they were in
a UN I.D.P.
Camp you know internal displaced persons it was attacked by militia they went took
shelter in
a little hut they discovered that there were four women and nine children in that.
The militia burst in with their. Forty seven's and axes and sticks
and saw these two you know obviously non Sudanese they are somewhat uniformed
fairly official looking people and said get out of here Derek and Andras were well
trained they had done their teamwork they all had to do was glance at one another
they knew exactly what they were going to do they simply looked at these people
very calmly and said we are not leaving the militia threaten them three times and
three times they said I'm sorry we're not leaving the militia turned and went away
. And so if you look at this picture you ask yourself why are these men smiling.
They're smiling because they just saved the lives of eleven people but they're also
smiling because they have just shown
a way out of the war system and they're also smiling at the deepest level because
they have upheld
a deeper newer image of the human being who are people going to country where
they're not even in the same race as the people there and risking their life soley
for peace that's
a different image of the human being than what we've known before so to go back to
our story we also have new demographics and new actors women's movement has been
incredibly helpful and indigenous people now have networks by which they are able
to. Get involved in global events without losing their diversity
without losing identity and finally we have the creation of
a new story which I've been talking about. This is I hope this is the right
slide this is part of our road map project which we'll be talking about in our
workshop this afternoon we have attempted to bring nonviolent Gandhian
principles to bear on the present movement and see if there's
a way where without losing our diversity we could get the energy of
a single concerted movement and. There's. A
trajectory from person power or term for personal empowerment to construct
a program to nonviolent resistance to programs such as.
We stumbled on this ourselves and then we went to Birmingham Alabama and had
a three day workshop with I. Who grew up in Uganda. And the
first day was on the personal practices and meditation stuff in the from the second
day was on constructive program and the third day was on such Alcoa So he said we
must have stumbled on something and this person power area we have settled on five
practices which anyone can do which we believe would make us more effective
peacemakers and nonviolent actors and therefore in a way get us
a step closer to our own personal fulfillment as human beings and the first one is
the most unpopular by far and that is avoid the mass media.
If you want to get
a little bit more finessed you can say don't expose yourself to images
of human degradation but it amounts to the same thing. This will create
a vacuum in your mind which the medicine to will then come. Come over the hill
waving
a spanner and say hey we can help you learn about learn everything you can about
nonviolence it's actually a substitute culture an alternative culture get
a spiritual practice a little bit more about that in
a second. Try to relate to everyone personally our civilization has caused us
to be so isolated from one another in fact even those who are big fans of social
media and started pointing out that you know you walk down the street and people
are listening to somebody else. Thinking that you. OK I don't want to dilate too
much on that story but and then finally this is I think it's very important tell
the story now Nick Rockefeller once tried to recruit
a very wealthy friend of his into being an Economic Hit Man. Come with me we'll go
down to Guatemala we can destroy the economy of the whole country just to snap you
know and we'll make millions and to his surprise this wealthy friend of his who had
been investing with him and so forth said no I don't want to do that and
Rockefeller said to him Why do you care about those people. Now by and large when
we hear something like that. So you know OK if you don't if you have to ask
a question then I can't explain it. You know but I'm thinking that we should be
able to explain it because people complain you know that the Republicans have their
own story they have this horrible little story they keep telling it over and over
again and it matters that counts so we also should be able to articulate and this
is what we're going to be practicing
a little bit at the workshop Well OK if someone says Why do you care about these
people because who are all interrelated life it turns out is not made up of
separate material particles as I was taught in high school
a long time ago but rather because we are body mind and spirit we are all
interconnected and if I hurt you I'm hurting myself you may not believe me but
anyway that's where I stand that's why I'm not going to do this with you. So.
Ghandi obviously was one who had
a very deep spiritual practice he called it prayer meeting but. My spiritual
teacher actually got started as
a seeker by going to one of these quote prayer meetings and seeing Gandhi go into
a state like this of complete absorption and it was because of that that he was
able to hit on this incredible scheme of picking up
a pinch of salt in April one thousand nine hundred thirty and bringing down the
British Empire on the level but he had the insight to do that and it's because of
that that he had the ability to win people over the wives and workers of the
Lancashire steel mills he had put them out of
a job by boycotting British cloth and they warned him don't go there in one
thousand nine hundred thirty one in Lancashire and he said where I want to meet
these people. And he took him about half an hour to explain what he was doing you
know he said you have three hundred thousand unemployed I have three hundred
million unemployed and things like that and at the end of it you have this scene
which I call it. And. So
we. Also said that you may believe in nonviolence but unless you have
some meditation practice when you're facing the dogs and when they're hitting you
with the sticks that belief is going to go out the window it's relatively
superficial you need to ground it every day in
a practice and if you're looking for one we may have some suggestions help you. The
deepest wisdom doesn't come either from scientists or their wisdom or their wisdom
traditions sages said it comes from bumper stickers.
And this one was tacked on to
a good guitar that was hanging on this fence or friend of mine front yard and Tamal
us we are not human beings having
a spiritual experience which is very Californian thing to believe we are actually
spiritual beings having
a human experience. I will say no more about that just now but we have developed
what we call Charkha points used to be called Bullet points but that's too violent
for us so.
These are spinning wheel points which we propose that if we were to assimilate.
Make it our own and use it whenever we get an opportunity even sometimes we don't
get into it get an opportunity and I just walk into
a bar and say You realize they were body mind and spirit. And
they're forcing So I think that would probably and this is
a work in progress if you have other suggestions about what are the basic Charkha
points that we should be promoting. I would be more than happy to hear them we
really are I really feel that if we get people talking about why we're doing what
we're doing it's
a combination of the effective nonviolent action and the plausible explanation
could be very very powerful. So those points are the unity of life I think
Christian you were saying last night about tech not on taking that we enter our I
didn't make up the slide after I heard your talk I heard you have this and that we
are not determined by our D.N.A.
A or neurons or hormones or anything else but this is with the newspapers
just about once a day they will report on
a scientific. Experiment that says that you are Republican because of this gene
or you like crunchy peanut butter because of that hormone and it's totally untrue
we have this irreducible free will as the priming experiment of we learn
Fiske are able to demonstrate we have tremendous inner resources which are
constantly. Concealed from us by this advertising that we need things from the
outside world and of all of those inner resources I would say the capacity to be
nonviolent and to respond to nonviolence when we encounter it is
a Deep the deepest perhaps the deepest part of our human nature so I put this
before you as
a version of the new story which if you feel comfortable with it you might want to
adopt and I'll just close with. A little anecdote if I can get through it often
causes me to get emotional professors are not supposed to do that but.
The day after Gandhi's assassination nine hundred forty eight there was an American
journalist in the south of India who was overwhelmed B.
Imagine being in
a subcontinent with nearly four hundred million people every one of whom was going
through
a power of grief it never experienced anything like it he went to one of his Indian
Francis said what is going on here and the man said Well the people believe that
there was
a mirror in the Mojave in which was reflected the greatest that we are capable of
and we are now afraid that that mirror has been shattered. So the story that I have
been trying to share with you this morning is that The Mirror has not been
shattered it's been covered over with a lot of dust. And perhaps this will be
a way for us to blow away some of that dust and realize who we are thank you very
much with by
with so what is roadmap as
a project roadmap has three phases and we are about about in the
middle or about one and
a half ways into the project the first part of the project which came directly out
of hope tank conversations was to develop this beautiful Mandela that you see
behind me which is the schematic representation of the entire progressive movement
as you can see and the second part of the project was to create
a web based tool through which people working on any part of the road map
could connect with people working on that issue so let's say let's just take by you
know arbitrarily you're interested in peace. Why should anyone be interested in
peace but you are so you click on that little dof. Icon and that
clicks you through well right now what you'll find is
a Facebook based blog of people who are interested in that issue but
eventually what we'd like to do is to make it
a kind of visual database of other groups working in that issues so people who have
signed up and said they don't mind being contacted by others who will appear there
on
a kind of map and you'll be able to get in touch with them and share resources like
you say OK I'm
a terrific Web designer someone in the group in this area needs web design you can
connect up that way and more importantly even then that I think start to share
resources so here are the best practices for promoting peace work
here's things that we found don't work here's things we want to wait on. And cetera
so that will be face to and were almost there and we need to raise
a little more money and get another phase of the web design completed so we working
with
a group called Look at Shakti that has almost this functionality already I can't
tell you exactly when but I think that before long you'll be able to go on and
connect through to other people who are working in the area that you know certainly
interested in it understood we're all interested in different areas and different
times you may want to connect up with other groups that's fine so that's face to
face three this is where it gets really exciting
and I guess I don't I know the least about how this phase is going to work but the
point of phase three. Is to come up with
a long term strategy
a strategy for the entire movement and. Just keep it
on hold for
a little bit I'm going to go back to the beginning work my way up to that and I'll
tell you how we think that that might work OK so any question so far I mean what I
was going to do next is kind of go up to the model and show you what the different
sectors are why it's designed the way it is so here is how this thing
works the issues that we need to address to change the world to get the great
turning to happen to get to the new paradigm whatever we want to call it we spent
a lot of time filtering that down to six basic areas and the area that we put
top dead center can speak as we consider it the most important is what I was
talking about this morning the creation of a new story creation an ad opting of
a new vision of who we are and what the world is what we're supposed to be doing
here at cetera Now each of these six sectors is divided into three subsectors
those are only for example there are many many. Projects that you could put in
there Gandhi had eighteen projects in his constructed program so we thought this is
a magic number we want to have eighteen also so we do but that was just you know
our self indulgence and you don't have to pay too much attention to that part. But
we feel that peace democracy and social justice the economy and then climate and
the environment we gave separate sectors to because of the extreme urgency of the
climate issue I mean one thing that all of us agree on is that if we don't resolve
that one very soon and even in my lifetime there will be no more issues for us to
resolve so for that reason we broke it out into two. Now
the this is where it starts to be very Gandhian. We propose that this be
regarded as
a centrifugal trajectory that all of us are going to do something about
our own personal empowerment and peace through Here's where we suggested those five
points this morning of avoiding the mass media learning everything you can about
nonviolence get a spiritual practice relate very personally to others create
a person based civilization and then finally find your passion is the way we put it
in this region here where do your strengths and weaknesses most closely match the
needs of the world and what we would now add to that is to use every opportunity
to tell the news story and we're going to be doing an exercise about that shortly.
So at this point we actually numbered these stages we don't necessarily mean
that these things have to be chronological if you're working on something urgent
like climate change we're not saying drop everything start meditating go to Tibet
you know Hank come back when you're
a loom and it's not like that but above all we should never neglect personal
development because that's how we lead to burnout lack of discrimination and so
forth so. Yeah I think that's all I need to tell you about
how. MONDELLO works oh no that isn't. I forgot one of the neatest things.
And that is that Gandhi had a concept called sw
a day she which meant I suppose you could roughly translate that as
a localism and it meant working within your own sphere and when you had done your
job correctly in your sphere your capacities would expand and you'd find yourself
able to work in
a broader sphere but he was very very serious about sweaty people come to him and
say I want to join the movement he would say where do you come from and the person
would name
a village and Gandhi would be familiar with that village because he had visited so
many of them he would say your village is a mess your village is
a cesspool for you to come and join the National Movement and leave your village
and that can condition would be
a sin you go back and work in your village and the same could be applied and he did
apply it to our personal capacities could we have strengths and weaknesses we
should be aware of them working on them when we do our job in that circle however
small it may be our capacities will expand and without being conscious of it this.
Centrifugal model is
a very good say she model because here and we're actually going to imitate that in
our workshops starting in
a little while here in person power you're working on yourself. It's very sweet
a she in constructive program you're working with your friends to build the
things that you need getting together with your community members and so forth when
you've done those two things then you are ready to confront the powers that be. And
of course we designed this as
a kind of reaction to occupy which went exactly the other way so let's start by
protesting at the biggest scale possible and then when we were thrown off the
street then they discovered constructive program at least they did that much
because a lot of people when they fail at
a big outside circle at it they fail when they start by means of protest they often
give up and many many
a movement has gone through that cycle so it did much to their credit that they
went on to discover. Occupy Sandy and occupy Jubilee
and things like that but there's
a great strength that comes from starting with the smallest possible circle and the
nobody can prevent us from self empowerment it's entirely within our purview
you don't have to join an organization form
a new five zero one c three because of Michael Nagler improvement projects or
whatever and then to get together with people to build the things that we want is
a very powerful predecessor to saying we don't want to things that you have built
and if you get a hold of my book you'll see that I devoted a chapter to construct
a program because it is so often overlooked and is so powerful.