peacemaking – Engaging Peace

The Yin and Yang of Detachment and Compassion

Posted on January 11, 2020January 11, 2020 by kathiemm

by Stefan Schindler

The peacemaker’s path is a rhythm, a balance, a dialectic. Faced with the horrors of the postmodern world, it is necessary to refresh oneself daily with what Kierkegaard calls “infinite inwardness.” In Asian terms – Buddhism is a way of staying sane in a world gone mad, and a way of healing the madness. Detachment and a passion for compassion go together like Yin and Yang.

It’s not a question of cultivating apathy, in any degree. It’s a question of letting go, having faith, taking the time to put the world on hold to sink into the bliss-wisdom-grace of one’s own enlightened heart, there to be nourished, strengthened, and refreshed, so as to return to the world with a passionate but equanimitous dedication to peace and justice.

Total freedom from suffering is a nirvanic ideal, and if we’re lucky, we occasionally get a fleeting glimpse of it; but striving for it is like a monkey trying to grasp the moon’s reflection in a pond. Buddha was a pragmatist. His path to equanimity – balancing compassion and detachment – is a Middle Way. For us, it’s a razor’s edge. And Socratic refreshment of the soul – Kierkegaard’s boundless faith in what Plato calls the Good, the True, and the Beautiful – can benefit from meditation, but just as easily be found in a walk in the park, a walk in the forest, a walk along the beach, baking bread, or pruning a garden.

You and I and so many others … we’re just Pilgrims on The Path, and it’s OK to feel, really feel, sorrow, even anger, so long as we attempt to respond to those emotions with some degree of enlightenment. For us, a broken heart is an Opening Heart. Crucifixion leading to Resurrection. Not merely once or twice in a lifetime. Rather, the more informed one is, the more haunted life becomes by the tragic and absurd – all the unnecessary and ceaseless suffering humans cause other humans – and the crucifixion-resurrection rhythm becomes a part of every day, for decades.

Daily faced with the Chinese holocaust in Tibet, going on sixty years now, perhaps there is no more broken-hearted person in the world than the Dalai Lama, and yet, from the depths of that abyss he daily rises to teach peace and work for peace, with a smile and a sense of irony and humor, because in that same abyss he finds a measure of peace, where the finite is kissed by the infinite.

FROM DARKNESS AT NOON TO THE GLOW OF HOPE, Part 2

Posted on July 12, 2018 by kathiemm

by Stefan Schindler

The Tragic Triumph of the Reagan Counter-Revolution

Against The Spirit of the Sixties, Now Counterbalanced by

the Rekindling of Candles in the Wind

What is to be done about the country in times that seem increasingly dark? Well, all is not lost. The seeds of peace sown in The Sixties continue to sprout across the land. If despair is blowin’ in the wind, so is hope, and the reinvigorating of protest against the status quo. If more and more people are sleepwalking through history, it is also true that more and more people are waking up.

Yes, the sophists, dogmatists and fanatics are better funded and better organized; but there is also an ongoing energizing of national and global enlightenment. A reawakening of the enlightened protest that was the signature glow of The Spirit of The Sixties.

You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one: Imagine: a world living in peace. More and more people are doing that, and committed to acting in such a way as to bring it about. For example, the Dalai Lama is one of the most admired people in the world. He is a living archetype of peacemaking, calling for egalitarian economics, ecological sanity, and a common religion of kindness.

Meanwhile, forums for enlightened discourse proliferate daily. Engaging Peace, Political Animal, and The Peace Abbey Foundation are three such forums.

Let us, then, as we said in The Sixties, “Keep the faith,” “Keep on truckin’,” commit to lives of voluntary simplicity, love our neighbors in the global village, sing our songs, do our dance, and stay committed to giving peace a chance.

We have a duty: the greater good to serve. And thus bequeath to our children: the world of peace and beauty they deserve.

Imagine it here and now.

Conscience and Consciousness

Posted on September 25, 2016September 25, 2016 by kathiemm

Blessed are the Peacemakers by George Bellows. Anti-war cartoon depicting Jesus with a halo in prison stripes alongside a list of his seditious crimes. First published in The Masses in 1917. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 70 years or less.

by Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., September 25, 2016

“Call to Conscience”

The “Call to Conscience” is a noble call, sanctified and consecrated by the sacrifices of peacemakers.

With uncommon courage and conviction, notable peacemakers, including Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, Helen Caldicott, Glenn Paige, Bell Hooks, Mairead McGuire, Antonio DeRosa, Dalai Lama, Daisaku Ikeda, and scores of others, modeled “conscience” as a way-of-life, accepting the quest for peace must be nurtured and sustained with the totality of one’s being . . . each breath an affirmation of commitment.

When Jesus of Nazareth, in his “Sermon on the Mount,” stated: “Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they shall inherit the earth,” Jesus invited all to assume the role of peacemakers. Those accepting his anointing have refused to be silenced in the face of oppression. From Jesus to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., peacemakers have endured criticism, condemnation, and persecution from those with wealth, power, and position, those benefitting from the outcomes of war.

To the wealthy, powerful, positioned, and war-hawks content with distance from human suffering, indifferent to the pains and sorrows of victims of violence, war, and prejudice, oblivious to the consequences of self-indulgence, I say you risk eternal damnation as your children behold with contempt your lack of conscience, your failure to model peace.

The “Call to Conscience” requires courage amidst abuse. There is, however, no lamentation among peacemakers. This is the paradox! For peacemakers, the rewards of advocacy ensure their legacy will endure because it affirms human dignity. For peacemakers, mockeries of justice, inequalities of opportunity, denials of hope, distortions of truth, and corruptions of law, compel advocacy!

Peacemakers are not idealists; Peacemakers are realists! Peacemakers awaken humanity to “consciousness!” This fact is testimony to the promise: “Peacemakers will inherit the earth.”

Consciousness

“Conscience” cannot be separated from “consciousness,” nor can “consciousness” from “conscience.” What do I mean?

The very act of seeking and making peace releases us from normal states of human existence. The release sanctions a state of “transcendence,” a state of “consciousness,” a new level of being. It is a release from an isolated self pre-occupation to an awareness of connection to each other and to the cosmos in which we live.

“Consciousness” compels exercising responsibilities, duties, and obligations to speak and to act for peace; implicit within “consciousness,” is a moral impulse to advance and benefit the human condition. Inherent within this recognition, is the awareness “life is sacred!”

The splendor and majesty of “consciousness” is the liberation of our being. “Consciousness” brings a new way-of-knowing (i.e., epistemology), and new way of behaving (i.e., praxiology). It unleashes new ways of understanding human nature (i.e., ontology).

Can anything more be asked? “Conscience” and “consciousness” are the keys to awakening the human spirit, too long subdued and contained by comforts of convention. Peacemaking is the path! Discover its virtues! Join the icons of peace, finding in them, and with them, a transcendent vision and experience of the grandeur of life. Accept the “Call to Conscience.”

Author: Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus, University of Hawaii, Manoa Campus, Honolulu, Hawaii, 96822. He is the author and editor of twenty books, and more than 300 publications noted for challenging the ethnocentricity and biases of Western psychology and psychiatry, and for advocating peace and social justice.

Can compassion replace humiliation?

Posted on April 7, 2011July 6, 2011 by kathiemm

Humiliation is clearly a means for showing disregard and contempt, and is perhaps particularly insidious because it can be done without any direct physical contact.

Countless experts on the Middle East have made note of centuries of humiliation by Christian invaders. Those invaders took land and resources by force, divided peoples up into arbitrarily created countries to weaken political and military resistance, and denigrated the most popular religion of the area.

Because of wide recognition of the destructive aftermath of humiliation, the Preamble of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins by stressing the importance of recognizing that:

“…the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” and that “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind….”

Acting ethically to promote human rights, peace, and reconciliation becomes particularly challenging in the face of inhumane acts perpetuated by other human beings. Certainly, the retaliation of Muslim militants against innocent people in a U.N. Mission in Afghanistan is horrifying, just as is the desecration of the Qu’ran by Terry Jones.

By now we should understand how violence begets violence in a constantly escalating spiral. We have not yet solved the threat of Star Wars or other forms of mass destruction that can wipe the human race from the planet.

We must develop new ways of dealing with insults to our beliefs and our rights–alternatives that don’t promote the spiral of retaliations. One such approach is the Compassionate Listening Project (see video below).

An outgrowth of years of reconciliation efforts with Israel and Palestine, the initiative is designed to teach peacemaking skills at every level of human interaction from the personal family to the global family. Members of this project are ready to talk to anyone, including terrorists, to promote peace.

Can we even imagine a world where compassion and listening replace humiliation and retaliation?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology