Tag: the Dalai Lama

Shanti Sena and the Modern Blooming of Ahimsa

Posted on by kathiemm
Gandhi Memorial at the Peace Abbey. Author: Stefan Schindler

by Stefan Schindler

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Kindly join me in appreciating that The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey “family,” near and far, belong to an unofficial organization – Seth would call it an Unfoundation – called Shanti Sena.  Shanti Sena means Peace Army.  It was founded by Mahatma Gandhi in India in the 1920s.

John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and The Beatles – unofficially and unknowingly, but with great determination – joined Shanti Sena in the 1960s.

So did Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, and Yoko Ono.  So did Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama.  And Paul Newman, James Baldwin, Joni Mitchell, and Muhammad Ali.

Today, their life and legacy is carried forth by Greta Thunberg, Victor Wallis, Vandana Shiva, and so many others, recalling the courage of conscience of Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, Helen Keller, Mark Twain, Thomas Merton, and Oscar Romero.

In this sense, then, we – as honored members of the Engaging Peace community and supporters of positive peace – are all students for a democratic society; indeed, for a global village of ecological sanity and egalitarian harmony.

T. S. Eliot ends his poetic masterpiece, “The Wasteland,” with … “Shantih shantih shantih.”  And thus, I salute you.  For you are bodhisattvas and kalyanamittas.

A bodhisattva is committed to a life of learning and service; and, therefore, to the active practice of “positive peace-making,” rooted in ahimsa (non-violence).  Kalyanamitta means: “virtuous friend” and “spiritual companion.”

Let us recognize that the dream that never dies also grows.  And let us remember that the dream was never over, because John never ceased to IMAGINE.

Therefore, let us keep the faith, and daily water the seeds of peace with our commitment to justice and universal brother-sisterhood.

The Shanti Sena does indeed endure.  And together, with a reverence for Mother Earth and the sacred spark that grew us in the womb, we are – Yes, we are! – creating a Rainbow Bridge to The Peaceable Queendom.

Said the sage: “The reward for service is increased opportunity to serve.”

Om Shanti Om.

Don Stefan

PS: Here is the link to the Peace Abbey website: www.peaceabbey.org.

The Peace Abbey grew out of The Life Experience School.  Together, they house The National Registry for Conscientious Objection; present The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award to individuals who embody the spirit of Shanti Sena; promote vegetarianism and animal rights; still hope to have the Memorial Stone for Unknown Civilians Killed in War planted in Arlington National Cemetery; and maintain The Pacifist Memorial Peace Park (in Sherborn), at the center of which is a nine-foot statue of Gandhi, fanning out from which are brick walls displaying bronze plaques in honor of those peacemakers who have received the Courage of Conscience and Champion of Peace awards.

Now, here is the link to a short, thrilling, video-tribute to The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey, created by film-makers at The Radiance Project. ………………………………………………………………………………….

Stefan Schindler is a philosopher, teacher, and poet.  He is co-author with Lewis Randa, the founder of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey, of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection.  Stefan is a frequent contributor to Engaging Peace; a Board Member of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey; author of The Courage of Conscience Awards for John Lennon and Howard Zinn; and author of Space is Grace, Discoursing with the Gods, The Tao of Socrates, and America’s Indochina Holocaust.  His newest book – Buddha’s Political Philosophy – will be published later this year.

Growing into The Spirit of The Sixties

Posted on by kathiemm

Stefan Schindler with John Lennon collage

by Stefan Schindler

In my early childhood – born just north of San Francisco, and fresh from two years in England – I spent four years in Texas, then one in Alabama, unconsciously absorbing from both states a culture of racism and American superiority.

Then the family moved to Japan, where I spent three years absorbing a new culture, and, subconsciously, an alternative worldview. It changed my life, and I shall be forever grateful. When the family moved from Japan to Pennsylvania, I was shocked to discover fellow students who had never been out of their home state. I was like a visitor from the moon.

My formal education continued to be mostly ignoration, but the year was 1960, just in time for me to grow into The Spirit of The Sixties. As I  watched The Beatles evolve into Peacemakers, coinciding with my college years, I began to realize just how brainwashed I had been.

My father, a bomber pilot in World War Two, was a career officer in the U.S. Air Force, rising through the ranks to become a Lieutenant Colonel. Hence our family’s many moves around the country and the world. Hence also my military upbringing.

When I entered Dickinson College in 1966, I joined ROTC (and its elite “Pershing Rifles” group). I quit after six weeks, having been ordered to do this and that my entire life, and now, in college, finally free from my father’s commanding influence, and joyfully participating more and more in the anti-establishment counter-culture revolution.

By my senior year at Dickinson, 1970, while President Nixon continued The Vietnam War, I was a member of S.D.S – Students for a Democratic Society – and with fellow peacemakers disrupting ROTC drill performances on the football field, and, more importantly, marching in peace demonstrations outside the gates of the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, just a few blocks from Dickinson.

After graduate school, post-1975,  I embarked upon a self-education program, leading to my further political awakening, a new appreciation for Mark Twain and William James as members of The Anti-Imperialism League, and the writing of my book, America’s Indochina Holocaust: The History and Global Matrix of The Vietnam War.

Now, just about a year from 2020, I see The United States of Amnesia failing to learn the lessons of history, and increasingly becoming a high-tech version of Plato’s cave, governed by plutocracy, divided more and more by economic apartheid, and careening toward ecological apocalypse, nuclear war, and another Great Depression. John Lennon was right – “We are led by lunatics.”

Fortunately, the spirit of Emerson, James, and Twain lives on in the activism, writings and wisdom of people like H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, I. F. Stone, Martin Luther King, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, John Pilger, John Prados, Dan Ellsberg, the Berrigan brothers, Molly Ivins, Howard Zinn, Bertrand Russell, Amy Goodman, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Victor Wallis, Naomi Klein, Lewis Lapham, Thich Nhat Hann, Sulak Sivaraksa, the Dalai Lama, Vandana Shiva, and so many others.

Like Maya Angelou, I know “Why The Caged Bird Sings.” I know that the meaning of life is learning and service. And I give thanks for friends like Toni Snow and Lewis Randa, who help me keep the faith and keep on truckin’, as a Compassionate Peacemaker and global citizen, committed to Universal Brother-Sisterhood.

Note from Kathie MM: Please share with people on your email lists Stefan’s inspiring story of his journey to peace activism-and send us your own story for publication on engaging peace. Many families, many communities, include peace activists who go about the business of making the world a safer more just and human place. Share the stories. 

 

CRAZY WISDOM

Posted on by kathiemm

By Stefan Schindler

 Do you occasionally feel that you’re about to go crazy? Or think that perhaps you already have? Do you often feel like Don Quixote, vainly tilting at windmills? Yes, probably. But then you remember the meaning of the term Greater Fool. A Greater Fool is one who exhibits greatness in commitment to peace, no matter how foolish that commitment seems in a world intent on going mad.

You remember that you are not alone. You have comrades. Millions of brothers and sisters equally committed to kindness and compassion. They too are Greater Fools, like Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, Romero, Tolstoy, Emerson, Tagore. Like Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, Helen Keller, Vandana Shiva, Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein. Like Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali. Like Mark Twain, William James, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Michael Moore, Howard Zinn. Like Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, George Fox, Matthew Fox, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama. Like Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, Susan Sarandon, the Trung sisters of Vietnam. Like Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. John and Robert Kennedy, too. Greater Fools, one and all.

And, yes, The Beatles. “All you need is love,” they sang, and you hum it every day. War without end seems to be the world’s way, and yet you never cease to chant, “Give peace a chance.” The Statue of Liberty weeps. Mother Earth is crucified. Storm clouds darken the horizon. And yet you sing: “Here comes the sun.” Yes, I am you, you are me, and we are all the walrus. We have each other. We keep the faith. We persevere.

Chogyam Trungpa, combining Tibetan Buddhism and Zen, called it Crazy Wisdom. So, yes, it’s OK to be a little crazy, as long as your craziness is that of the Greater Fool. Humanity may elect lunatics for leaders, and go about their business sleepwalking through history. Yet you, at least, are awake. Indeed, you are part of The Great Awakening. You belong to The Global Peace Abbey. It welcomes all and has no walls. We are warriors for peace, on the cutting edge of evolution. There is no greater satisfaction, no greater joy, no greater service.

So rejoice, my friend. The angels sing your praises, and lend you unconditional support. The reward for service is increased opportunity to serve.

Enlightenment and Social Hope, Part 1

Posted on by kathiemm

Searching for Enlightenment by Kathie Malley-Morrison

 

By  Stefan Schindler

In his 1784 essay on the nature of Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant declared: “Enlightenment is liberation from self-imposed immaturity.” He also noted that, if I may be so bold as to paraphrase, “We live in an age of enlightenment, but we do not yet live in an enlightened age.”

Kant’s observations ought to give us pause. They are worth pondering. They are as relevant today as they were in the late 18th century. To reflect upon them with the seriousness they deserve, we might begin by noting that one hundred years later, another German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, said of the same Prussian country in which Kant wrote his revolutionary Critique of Pure Reason: “This nation has made itself stupid on purpose.”

Nietzsche’s observation applies to America today. So does the maxim by George Santayana: “Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it.” Let us then pause a moment to reflect upon the possibility – indeed, the necessity – of what Richard Oxenberg calls “heart-centered rationality.”

Heart-centered rationality is a way of referring to The Golden Rule, revived by Martin Buber in the Kantian-based ethics of his book I and Thou. Kant and Buber argue for the innate dignity of every person; a dignity worthy of respect. In order, then, to put an end to what the post-Kantian philosopher Hegel called “the slaughter-bench of history,” we need an ethical, educational, and cultural revolution; one in which cooperation has primacy over competition, and which embraces what the Dalai Lama calls “a common religion of kindness.”

Accordingly, we must recognize that our collective survival now depends upon a global commitment to what might best be called The Enlightenment Project. This, of course, returns us to Kant’s definition of enlightenment, which I will elaborate on in my next post, with reference to other major figures in the history of philosophy and the pursuit social justice.

Meanwhile, we might begin by noting that during America’s wars on Puerto Rico and the Philippines, Mark Twain declared: “America’s flag should be a skull-and-crossbones.” And when Mahatma Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied: “I think it would be a good idea.”

Co-founder of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a recipient of The Boston Baha’i Peace Award, and a Trustee of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey Foundation, Dr. Stefan Schindler received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston College, worked one summer in a nature preserve, lived in a Zen temple for a year, did the pilot’s voice in a claymation video of St. Exupery’s The Little Prince, acted in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” and performed as a musical poet in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City.  He also wrote The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Awards for Howard Zinn and John Lennon.  He is now semi-retired and living in Salem, Massachusetts. His books include The Tao of Socrates, America’s Indochina Holocaust, Discoursing with the Gods, and Space is Grace; his forthcoming book is Buddha’s Political Philosophy.