Introduction

As I write this introduction (in summer 2019), the climate crisis is tightening its noose around our planet. By the time you read this book, 150 million people in India will be without water; in Chennai, the sixth largest city in the country, it’s already gone. We may legitimately ask ourselves, will nonviolence be enough to save us?

My answer is, will anything else? For those who think of nonviolence as a set of techniques of insurrection and protest, of noncooperation, that may well not be enough. But that is not what Gandhi meant by nonviolence, and not what I mean either. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, in a real sense, Mahatma Gandhi in his life embodied certain universal principles that are inherent in the moral structure of the universe, and these principles are as inescapable as the law of gravitation. And as useful, when you’ve mastered them. Nonviolence in this sense can be deployed across the whole array of human change from personal empowerment to the construction of alternatives to powerful resistance. That is what this book is about.

Anyone who advocates nonviolence—and that has been my passion for forty years—will be familiar with two extremely common objections:

   “It never would have worked against the Nazis.”

   “That’s just not human nature.”

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard these complaints! But it would be worth a lot more if we could set them at rest.

The first objection can be dealt with relatively easily. Nonviolence actually did work against the Nazis where it was tried; for example, in the Rosenstrasse Prison demonstration of February through March 1943 with the war raging in Europe. The Berlin Gestapo had rounded up Jewish men who had been spared arrest to date because they were married to “Aryan” women. The women, however, followed their husbands to the street in front of No. 1-2 Rosenstrasse, a former Jewish community center now turned detention facility. The Gestapo of course ordered them to disperse. They refused. By the end of the weekend the Gestapo blinked and released their fathers and husbands. Thus the women, with no training or preparation, directly saved some two thousand men from certain death and, we recently learned, indirectly saved untold thousands, when other occupied European capitals saw that it was no use trying to arrest them.¹

Human nature is a deeper question. As the late Huston Smith said at an education conference some years ago: “For our culture as a whole, nothing major is going to happen until we figure out who we are. The truth of the matter is, that today we haven’t a clue as to who we are. There is no consistent view of human nature in the West today.”²

No wonder it’s so hard to dislodge the claim that nonviolence is not human nature, despite the growing evidence that this isn’t true. In this book I will share with you the reasons why people cling to such a demoralizing vision of who they are, and what to do about it.

People have a hard time believing nonviolence can be a natural capacity (not to mention the natural capacity) because our educational system, our mass media—indeed, our whole culture—upholds a picture of reality that came to predominate around the time of the Industrial Revolution: namely, that the world consists of material particles that collide randomly, and that evolution is, or was (they tend to think it’s over now) a grim struggle for survival of the fittest, so inevitably competition and violence are just how life works. Now, the kind of nonviolence that I’m talking about—and I’ll say more about it shortly—just plain doesn’t make sense in that picture of the world, and because that picture is stored below the surface level of consciousness, it’s usually not up for discussion.

I experienced a concrete example of this in the wake of the Free Speech Movement (1964–65). Some faculty colleagues at UC Berkeley, whose ranks I had just joined, created a division in which any faculty member could offer a course on any reasonable subject. I seized on the opportunity to offer two closely related courses—courses that seemed to me essential components of a modern education that were completely missing—meditation and nonviolence. (The first was actually taught by my meditation teacher, Sri Eknath Easwaran; the second was my offering.) We had hit a nerve with both of them, and students poured in. But then came the big question: what next? What is nonviolence—political science? Sociology? Religious studies? It was “no room at the inn”; no department I approached felt it was part of their discipline, regardless of how much the students liked and, in my view, needed this course. We finally said, “Well, if there’s no home for this all-important subject, let’s make one.” A Peace and Conflict Studies Program (PACS) was born. Even that was not a permanent solution, however, as PACS was shuffled from one division to another until today, since I’ve left the campus for other work, it has been buried in another subdivision.

Some years and a career change later, the team and I decided to move the Metta Center for Nonviolence from Berkeley to Petaluma, California, to be closer to the spiritual community some of us belong to (and where I live). Answering an ad for some space in a local lawyer’s office, I entered the wood-frame building on the west side of town, and the receptionist motioned me toward the room. I looked it over (not too appealing) and walked back toward the front door. At this point the receptionist asked me—still not looking up from whatever she was doing—“What’s this for?”

“I have a nonprofit.”

“What do you do?”

“We promote nonviolence …”

“What kind of violence?!”

OK, maybe she just misheard me, but for me this encounter is kind of an allegory of how we, as a culture, are so aware of violence in its many forms and guises that it takes up the whole field of possibility. In fact, the allegory goes deeper. I remembered the day, years before, when my first book on nonviolence appeared and I got to assign it in my writing course. Being endowed with the normal amount of ego, I went eagerly down to the bookstore to see my very own book among the titles on the shelf for Comp. Lit. 1A. It wasn’t there! I turned away in chagrin—but then it caught my eye: it was there after all: America Without Violence. But the shelf label read “Violence in America.” Our minds are so preoccupied with violence we can’t even see its antidote when it’s dangled in front of us.

So, no, ma’am, nonviolence is not a kind of violence. That’s the problem: it’s exactly the other way around: violence is a breakdown of the natural order of things, whereas nonviolence is the manifestation of that order. The awkward term nonviolence that we use for something profoundly positive, even fundamental, is itself an example of how far we are from understanding what it refers to. Periodically, in fact, nonviolence advocates try to come up with another term that would be positive, like Gandhi’s satyagraha, or “clinging to truth,” or my favorite, “offering dignity” (alay dangal) from the Philippine People Power uprising; but so far nothing has stuck.

And so far, nonviolence is still not common coin. The other day I was visiting a friend who goes in for modern connective technology. To prove the point we’re talking about, she said in a loud voice, over her shoulder, “Alexa: what is nonviolence?” After a longish pause the answer came back from the corner of the room: “I am not able to answer your question.”

Nonviolence is so difficult to understand because by nature it is what Gandhi called a “living power”: a kind of unseen energy like electromagnetic waves but subtler and much more pervasive. It is constantly acting in living things, and we as human beings can learn to activate it in our own consciousness, with highly beneficial results. But what is a “living power”? To continue the insightful quotation from King: “In a real sense, Mahatma Gandhi embodied in his life certain universal principles that are inherent in the moral structure of the universe, and these principles are as inescapable as the law of gravitation.”³

Fine—and I find the phrase “moral structure of the universe” evocative and helpful—but when pressed to say more about it, we generally find that the word “moral” has become too vague to work with, even since Gandhi’s time.

When I was in school, I learned about plenty of nonliving, physical forces—gravity, electricity, and so on—but neither my teachers nor we students could get a handle on forces like love or empathy (or their opposites), which, it turns out, are just as predictable in their operations. It would take nothing short of a shift of our cultural paradigm to position us to understand this force. But such a shift is slowly happening, and that’s what this book is about: how to facilitate it, how to speed it up, and how each of us can help.

The purpose of this book, in other words, is to contribute as effectively as possible to the spread of nonviolence, its theory and practice, into the mainstream of modern culture. This will require a shift, from what Martin Luther King called our thing-oriented civilization to a person-oriented civilization; from a view of the universe as consisting of matter, with everything separate from everything else and no overall guiding purpose, to one of the universe as grounded in consciousness, such that everything is interconnected and human life in particular definitely does have a meaning and purpose—a view in which, as I see it, the spread of nonviolence plays a key role.

When you consider the effectiveness of nonviolence—its wide applications, how when practiced skillfully it actually adds to the spiritual growth not only of those offering it but also to those to whom it’s offered—(the exact opposite of the moral injury of using violence in whatever context)—you really wonder, not without some exasperation, why nonviolence isn’t doing what Gandhi said it’s capable of: sweeping over the world. The main reason, I’m convinced, is what I just mentioned: the prevailing worldview or paradigm, which from here on I’ll call the “old story” of materialism and separateness, particularly as it pertains to our image of who we ourselves are. If we really are physical beings in a universe without meaning, doomed to compete for our separate advantage, why should we care about the well-being or the feelings of another person? And without being able to rouse that lively concern in ourselves and evoke it from others, how would nonviolence even work? The fact is, we all do care about each other; but if our official story of the world and who we are can’t explain or even accommodate those feelings, we find it that much harder to hold on to them and consequently to awaken them in anyone else.

Now, nonviolence can work to some degree without this understanding. Sometimes you can get people to stop doing something by withdrawing your cooperation, and many do just that. They think of nonviolence as a tactic, period, and many an injustice has ground to a halt, many a dictator found himself out of office as a result. But other practitioners intuitively grasp that there’s more to it than that. The late Barbara Deming, a prolific writer and activist, used to speak of the two hands of nonviolence. One hand, upraised with palm facing forward, says, “I will not put up with your injustice.” The other, extended with palm facing upward in a gesture of welcome, says “but I’m open to you as a human being.” To do that, you must believe that behind all of your opponent’s hostility is a human being, which is not always easy in an intense conflict. You have to have faith that you can bring out this person’s humanity with your nonviolent attitude, because no matter how angry and alienated and threatening the person is at that moment, their humanity, that resonance of empathic awareness, can’t be utterly gone.

In the civil rights movement, after a lot of risk and sacrifice, after missing class and taking all kinds of abuse, the young activists in Tennessee succeeded in integrating some lunch counters. In an interview I arranged for a forthcoming documentary film, The Third Harmony, Bernard (now Doc) Lafayette relates how he asked his mentor, Jim Lawson, “Why don’t we finish the job? We don’t want to go through this all over again; let’s go on and do all the lunch counters in the city.”

“No, Bernard,” came the startling reply; “we’ve done our part. Now let them do the rest.”

Doc explained, “It was the most profound lesson I learned. That the goal was not changing the lunch counters … It was changing the hearts of the people who were sustaining and maintaining segregation. That’s when change comes—winning them over. And only love can do that. And that’s the power of nonviolence.”

MY JOURNEY TO THE NEW STORY

I arrived in Berkeley as a graduate student in 1960, in time for the now-famous upheaval that erupted four years later: the Free Speech Movement, in which I was duly swept up. By 1966 the movement had come to a seemingly successful conclusion, though those not as naïve as myself could already see signs that it was nowhere near the revolution we thought it was. (Later, as a professor, I was to learn how it had even caused a backlash of highly conservative policies.) If one wanted a place in which to take life seriously and hopefully in the sixties, Berkeley was that place. We were outraged, but not demoralized—outraged by the injustice and violence of the times, but not sunk anywhere near the demoralization and hopelessness we are pleased to call the new normal today. Not yet aware of the looming destruction of the very planet we live on, or the tenacity of the forces of regression, we thought the revolution of love and justice was at hand—in our hands. It was much more than a struggle for free speech; as the eloquent Mario Savio said, it was a struggle to stop being treated like cogs in a machine. It was a veritable revolution of the human spirit.

Could it happen again?

Is it perhaps happening now?

I was among those searching for some kind of spiritual answer to the problems manifesting themselves in political policies and practices; and accordingly, I was drawn into the keen interest in India that was sweeping over parts of the United States—especially California—as a natural outgrowth of our dissatisfaction with what we knew of our own world. As luck would have it, a representative of India’s spirituality whom I found perfect for my needs was giving talks on meditation right on campus. Sri Eknath Easwaran, a former professor, had come to the West specifically to share the method of passage meditation he had worked out for himself while still a professor in India. His students were profoundly impressed by the insights that Indian teachers had gained into the nature of life and human purpose through millennia of systematic, dedicated investigation. Coming off a major social movement, I was thrilled to learn that one of these teachers was Gandhi. Little by little I began to see answers to some of the gnawing questions that had been at the back of my mind since I had begun to feel that something was seriously wrong with the world. Many of those answers came from the practice of meditation itself, which I’ll have more to say about in chapter 3.

Around the same time, some of my senior colleagues started circulating four- or five-page documents turned out on mimeograph machines—the hot publishing technology of the day. They didn’t publish these papers in any peer-reviewed journals, which was all the more exciting. They were creating a kind of academic samizdat (borrowing the term for the clandestine distribution of dissident literature in eastern European communist countries), based on the breakthrough of science historian Thomas Kuhn, called the “paradigm shift.” His well-documented thesis was that while we like to think that science proceeds by cumulatively adding discoveries in a continuous process, what actually happens is that inconsistencies in the prevailing theory, or model of science pile up periodically until they’re too many and too basic to be ignored. They are recognized not as mere anomalies, in Kuhn’s terms, but as counter instances that call into question the whole model. A paradigm shift to a new model happens when multiple pioneering thinkers see a whole new framework that accounts for the anomalies. Copernicus and later Galileo did just this by positing that the earth orbits around the sun, refuting the idea that we are the fixed center of the universe, based on a literal (and self-congratulatory) reading of some verses from the psalms.

In the years I’ve wrestled with these two questions—nonviolence and the new story (the term we use today for the new—to us—model of a universe of consciousness and purpose, of unity and sufficiency)—I’ve often felt as though I were looking at the world through one of those now out-of-date cameras where you see two images, and to focus the picture you must bring them together. This I feel I have just about done, so I’d like to do something to break down the silos between the two communities that have been working on these two issues more or less in isolation (as are most progressive groups today, though that’s slowly improving). There are many problems we have to confront, and it’s becoming clear that we need each other and would be much more effective together.

Fortunately, there’s a growing recognition beyond the confines of the progressive world that the material paradigm of the world—the old story—is as inaccurate as it’s demoralizing; that consciousness and purpose and, yes, kindness and generosity—the new story—cannot be so easily written out of the reality we all inhabit. There is a search going on that’s so far mostly confined to a relatively small circle of people who tend to think about such things, which we can call the “new story community.” We tend to be most keenly aware of this story as it embraces our relationship with and dependency on the natural environment. This is essential, of course. I’m calling this focus, as I’ll explain shortly, the second harmony, after focus on the universe at large (the first harmony); but I’ve become convinced that even to solve our drastic problems of climate and the environment we need to go a step further, to that person-centered outlook that King calls for (which I’m calling the third harmony). And when we get there, we need to bring into focus the manifold capacities of this still unfamiliar power called nonviolence. In the words of environmentalist and educator Satish Kumar (emphasis added): “The contemporary environmental movement, in the main, follows the path of empirical science, rational thinking, data collection and external action. This is good as far as it goes but it doesn’t go far enough. We need to include care of the soul as a part of care of the planet.”⁴

I’ve come to believe that to develop nonviolence, as I understand it, people find themselves directly involved in “care of the soul.” So while nonviolence needs the new story—I came to this realization some time ago—the new story needs nonviolence. To marry them is no intellectual luxury. It’s a key to the change that has to happen, and fast, to ensure our very survival.

I use the word “story” here to mean something even deeper than the idea of frames made famous recently by George Lakoff; for example, the “club” frame, in which taxes are your dues to be a member, rather than the prevailing frame, in which taxes are a burden. When I reference the new story, I am talking about the overall window or paradigm through which a given culture sees the world—the story that tells itself, as it were, in the deep background of our consciousness. I would prefer the term “new vision”—such is its depth and power for change—but I use “new story” because it’s what people use. For example, in Re:Imagining Change, Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Canning say, quite correctly, that we live in a world defined by stories.⁵ They cite this important example: the onslaught of pervasive and ever more personalized advertising tells us that happiness and progress mean consume more, more, more regardless of the price tag to people and planet. That’s an outdated story. Or again:

Humans can dominate and outsmart nature.

or

Racism and war are part of human nature.

The last of these—our old chestnut again—is closer to the story I’m after. This is how the term is used by Thom Hartmann (as he concludes his tracing of the dichotomy back to the very founding of our national identity; my emphasis): “Being liberal or conservative isn’t a matter of where you stand on any particular issue. Some conservatives are very concerned about global warming. Some liberals oppose abortion. What makes people conservative or liberal is which story they believe at their core about the true nature of humans.”⁶

The currently prevailing story—the old story, that we live in a material, random universe, so that we, too, are primarily physical objects that need material things to be fulfilled—has led us to a permanent state of competition, not excluding violence. Whether you look at the story itself or its practical consequences, many—myself included—feel that it’s radically wrong. We are body, mind, and spirit, and we’re embraced in what Martin Luther King famously called a single garment of destiny. Life is not random, and we are not helpless to change it.

And right now the key change will be the change of the story itself.

Within the emerging new story we’ll be dealing with in the following pages, just about every social change that thoughtful people have long been yearning for—including the change to a sustainable planet—becomes more thinkable, and doable.

Take, for example, the acute inequality that has polarized our society (and, to a lesser extent, societies in other lands). What drives it is greed. The same greed that drives some to profit from war and armaments—the greed that is a nearly ubiquitous source of suffering for the many (and even for the few who seem to benefit financially). Is not greed, in turn, a function of the belief that we are primarily physical entities in competition with others?

For another example, the United States has an acute problem of mass incarceration. Only 12 percent of the soaring increase in incarceration in the United States between 1980 and 1996 was a response to an increase in crime: the other 88 percent was due to increased severity of sentences and similar punitive measures. In my state of California, in 2004, there were 360 people serving life sentences for shoplifting.⁷ Not to put too fine a point on it, psychiatrist James Gilligan, who worked with serious offenders for twenty-five years, calls our present system the most powerful stimulant of violence yet discovered.⁸ This system, like all institutions and practices, is part of a general model of human nature that causes us to see an offender as separate from us and needing to be punished to be brought into line or to satisfy an abstract idea of justice. But there is an alternative to this retributive justice, and it’s growing. According to sociologist and criminologist David Downes, it operates from a different model, in which the offender must be treated as a thinking and feeling fellow human being, capable of responding to insights offered in the course of a dialogue.⁹ This alternative, called restorative justice (we’ll have more to say about it in later chapters), is actually much more than just a different approach; it’s situated in an entirely different paradigm, featuring an entirely different conception of human relationships, based in turn on an entirely different conception of what a human being is. Restorative justice is growing mainly because it is vastly more effective and less costly, humanly and financially, than our present system. But if the new story were our way of viewing the world, restorative justice would grow even faster and in due time would become our normal way to respond to injury and offense.

There are those, of course, who profit financially from the prison industrial complex; there are those who profit enormously from war. Greed is behind so many destructive processes; greed that’s reached unheard-of proportions today, creating an inequality that makes meaningful democracy impossible. But what is behind greed itself? It could not exist without the idea that a human being is material and separate from others, including the environment we live in.

Violence, inequality, war, the environment, and almost any aspect of society we can think of are rooted in the old story. However, while Reinsborough and Canning, in Re:Imagining Change, are correct that stories are imbued with power, they are not imbued with the power to change themselves. Along with telling the story, therefore, we’re going to have to explore how such a great change can be facilitated. That great changes are possible is a fact of history. Think of the way Christianity swept over a pagan world, growing from an estimated 3.5 million to 35 million adherents in the course of one century (the fourth).¹⁰

But that particular paradigm shift also brings up a warning: the change from paganism to Christianity, to the idea that there was one benevolent ruler of the universe, was not a smooth transition (an understatement!). It brought in its wake a great deal of turmoil and suffering, and that, we want to avoid if at all possible. We need a dramatic change, and we need it rapidly, but in the words of North Carolina professor Sally Goerner, we want to do everything in our power to make it gentle, not catastrophic.¹¹ I think we can.

SOME DEFINITIONS

The ideas I’m trying to present are not very common in everyday discourse, so for the sake of clarity, let me state what I mean by some key terms. Because “nonviolence,” for example, is relatively new to our language, it’s only natural that people understand and use it in different ways.

Nonviolence. Especially toward the end of Gandhi’s career, when the perfect storm of World War II, independence from colonial rule, and horrific communal rioting struck India, he was at pains to specify that what the vast majority of people following him—including most in his own Congress Party—had adopted was the nonviolence of the weak, meaning the set of strategies one can adopt when sterner means are not available. (In Gandhi’s time, the hyphenated form “non-violence” was common; today most use it only for his “non-violence of the weak” and use “nonviolence” for that of the strong.) Often even this kind of nonviolence is adopted only provisionally, with a willingness to go back to violence if it doesn’t work. Importantly, it’s adopted by people who are not conscious of their inner strength. (It’s hard to expect they would be, under the old story.) But in this book “nonviolence” will mean a kind of power in living beings, a creative energy we can learn to develop and deploy in human interactions. Indeed, it is a not just a kind of what scientists today call subtle energy but rather a fundamental principle of life. I will try to make this clearer as we go on.

The new story. In contrast to the old story—which held that the universe is primarily made of matter, has no discernible purpose, and scarcity, competition, and violence are inevitable—the new story sees the universe as primarily consciousness and the human being as body, mind, and spirit, able to locate and carry out their life’s purpose in a meaningful—indeed, fundamentally benevolent—universe.

The third harmony. I modified this idea from a talk, and later a book (Your Life Is Your Message: Finding Harmony with Yourself, Others, and the Earth, 1997) by my meditation teacher, Sri Eknath Easwaran, who was himself borrowing a term from the eighth-century mystic and philosopher Shankara, who spoke of the tapatreya or “three sources of suffering”—the environment, other beings, and ourselves—that must be harmonized for us to be fulfilled. The new story community, as I’ll describe in more detail in chapter 4, seems to have focused on harmony with the universe, then the planet, and finally within ourselves—a harmony of the body, mind, and spirit that constitute a human being. I argue that in practical terms this third harmony, the harmony of spirit within, really comes first and is the most important (which is how Easwaran treats it in his book). But because of Shankara and this modern history, let’s continue to call it the third.

A story is a universal, largely unconscious vision that it is not easy to change. It’s kind of an unspoken constitution, a basis for ordinary laws. But constitutions can change, and so can stories. Armed with these definitions, we can get to the job of changing ours, keeping in mind four questions:

   Where is the new story to come from—what sources can we find to help us develop it?

   What is it actually telling us about who we are and what we need?

   How do we make the change happen without undue disruption? And, most importantly,

   What shall you and I do to empower this great shift?

In wrestling with these questions, I’ve come to feel that nonviolence holds a key to all them, to both the content and the adoption of the story. Nonviolence has been growing in extent and sophistication since Gandhi’s day, but is still incompletely understood even by the increasing number of activists who are using it. (As Erica Chenoweth put it in an interview for Metta’s forthcoming documentary, it’s becoming the technique du jour for insurrectionary movements, among others.) It remains unknown to the general public—witness my encounter with the receptionist in the lawyer’s office—despite the fact that, to paraphrase King again, we ignore it at our peril. And why do we ignore it? That old story of materialism and separateness.

To describe our program in another way, let me draw a contrast. The late Lynn Margulis—a highly regarded biologist—and her son Dorion Sagan put out a beautiful book with stunning photos, What Is Life?¹² They do a brilliant job of detailing the interlocking web of all living—and so-called nonliving—forms in the universe. But they still operate with concepts that are stuck in the old story. Thus they begin from the wrong premise: “Life is material.” And therefore they cannot but arrive at (1) a wrong conclusion—our future is to fly up in the sky and inhabit other planets (and do to them what we did to this one?) and (2) a dangerous, misleading implied prescription: there’s nothing to do, “life will go on.” We shall start from a very different premise and reach a different conclusion and a very different recommendation: life is consciousness, and (1) there is unfortunately no guarantee whatever that it will go on, especially if we do nothing about it; and (2) therefore there is much that we can and absolutely must do about it.

Now, what King actually said was that we ignore Gandhi at our peril. One reason I’ll be repeatedly drawing on Gandhi (and King) is that they knew early on that nonviolence—as they understood it, as a kind of living force that comes into its own in the human being—is a vital part of the new story. Just as violence, in its many forms, was an inevitable result of the prevailing worldview in the West. In this regard Gandhi was not as innovative as he may appear to us. If he was innovative, it was precisely because he was so traditional. What we call the new story was actually the perennial story that India’s civilization—like many others, including many indigenous cultures—had maintained for maybe five thousand years. All he did (all!) was to dust it off, adapt it for modern times, and fight like hell to show it was right. Successfully. Through nonviolence.

One more point, and maybe the most important: while we cannot ignore Gandhi—or King and the others—we cannot ignore what Gandhi himself said: that “any man or woman can do what I have done.” And, here and there, we are doing just that.