My Experiments With Person Power
Published in Nonviolence Magazine
July 29, 2016
“I’m going to take you out of politics…and when I put you back in you’ll be much more effective.” These words were spoken to me by Sri Eknath Easwaran, whom I met in the 1960s, just as the Free Speech Movement (FSM), with its giddying intoxication and its outrage at on-campus censorship of political speech at UC Berkeley, dwindled to a whimper of protest. So when I heard those words from the man I so admired, I was shocked but intrigued.
I was already beginning to realize that politics-as-usual would not solve our problems — mine or the world’s (it’s hard now, even, to imagine how much hope we students had placed in the FSM). No wonder people were hitchhiking to New Mexico, if not India, to find their spiritual teachers. All I had to do was walk across campus to the Meditation Room to find mine. It would take me a while to realize that Easwaran had, if anything, a greater passion than I did about the sufferings of the world, but he went about solving them in a fascinatingly different way — quietly! As the years went by I also realized, not without awe, that his approach was, just as he said, much more effective. He showed me that constructive work is a powerful complement to, if not a more effective substitute for, protest, and that unwavering respect for one’s opponent (hard as that may be to come up with) is not only the most effective persuasion, but lays the groundwork for lasting change, because human dignity (possibly Gandhi’s greatest discovery) is the basis of all justice and peace.
But at that time, only a few months after I had met him in 1966, the initial shock at being told to “get out of politics” was startling, and even the intriguing prospect of a more effective re-entry came with a personal cost. Long before the FSM broke up, an awkward and often painful split had already developed between those of us who wanted what Martin Luther King, Jr. was calling a “revolution of values” and those who built their revolutionary style more on Marx and Engels. The former, like myself, were uncomfortable with the angry mentality and rhetoric of the latter, who often looked on us with a scorn difficult to take from your former comrades.
That same split remains today, though the numbers of the spiritually inclined camp are slowly growing. Time after time, students in the Peace & Conflict Studies Program I went on to found at UC Berkeley would go out to join some worthy movement only to come drooping back: “I so want to help them, but I just can’t stand the anger.” I would tell them, though I’m not sure it helped much, that this problem was faced by none other than Mahatma Gandhi himself. When asked why so many of his colleagues bailed out of his movement after Independence, he explained: “I was on the train to Rishikesh [the spiritual center in the Himalayas]; they got off in Delhi.”
How can we be politically active, and effective, without upending our spiritual practice? The answer is nonviolence, especially as understood by Gandhi, who had inspired Easwaran’s own spiritual awakening when he met the Mahatma in the late 1940s. In this kind of nonviolence you try to convert your own anger and fear into creative, positive forces — no small trick — and to reject injustice decisively without offending the dignity or humanity of those still caught up in its execution. This enables them to change more readily, and without cost to our own state of mind or personal development. Indeed, that becomes the outer dimension of our inner growth.
So the second half of Easwaran’s promise is slowly being fulfilled. Perhaps the most important capacity I gained from the mythic journey, if you will, into meditation and back out to the tormented world is being able to bring compassion into play through spiritually-guided nonviolence. It becomes second nature for a meditator to stay aware of the positive when the world — sliding backwards as it is into the monstrosities of torture, slavery and ingenious violence — loses faith in its existence.
A signature contribution of the Metta Center for Nonviolence, which some friends and I founded in 1982 with Easwaran’s encouragement, is our interpretation of “Constructive Programme,” the term Gandhi coined to describe building community-level alternatives to repressive structures, systems and processes. Constructive Program is what makes it possible for me to stay enthusiastic in the face of apparent setbacks, with the understanding that we have the practical, strategic tools to create a different world — one in which all of our communities thrive, free from violence, and people can take up, once again, the search for meaning and fulfillment.
Since I’ve become a lot more aware of what makes me tick, I’ve also become more aware of what makes others tick. Thinking toward the long term is something I’ve learned to do. As with the FSM in the 1960s, many activists today seem to be caught up in reactive, immediate goals, and they tend to cling to (often empty) symbols, which can turn the exuberant energy of outrage into exercises in futility. Patience, long-term planning (aka strategy), constructive alternatives and compassion for the opponent are much less flashy but much more gratifying when you at last see them beginning to bear fruit.
So my advice to anyone listening? Don’t get off at Delhi! Stay on the train so you can really develop your person power and discover your own best contribution to the life around us.
