The real purpose of an economic system is to guarantee to every person in its circle the fundamentals of physical existence (food, clothing, shelter) and the tools of meaningful work so that they can get on with the business of living together and working out our common destiny.

Terrorism, as basically an extreme form of violence, follows the dynamics of violence anywhere: if you fight it with your own violence it gets worse (thought there might be some “successes” in the short run); if you respond to it with nonviolence not only do you keep from falling into the debilitating mindset of fear and anger yourself, history shows that you also tend to inhibit the repetition of such disasters.

Why aren’t we asking, “Who or what is creating an atmosphere of egotism and hate in our culture?” Unfortunately, because we already know the answer, and do not want to hear it.

Some praise the likes of Manning and Julian Assange for their courage, while others hate and fear them. Both reactions are understandable. But if, as a society, we scapegoat them, we are only trying to shift our own burden of guilt onto their shoulders, and to think we can get away with that for very long is a dangerous delusion.

The nonviolent revolution in Egypt has spread across the Mideast, but in Libya, unfortunately, the “revolution” was picked up without the “nonviolent.”

Deeply concerned individuals are doing very cogent work on environmental issues, yet somehow the same energies are not as clearly brought to bear on the war system, which we note does as much as or more than any other single human activity to destroy the environment.

Today we are reaching a similar crisis with the institution of war; despite appearances, people are becoming more aware that we cannot solve problems by waging war on them.  If you are not aware that this is happening, you are not alone; watch any news or “entertainment” program and you’ll see that competition, violence, and war are still considered “normal.” It’s rare to spot nonviolent alternative methods, since they are so rarely featured in mainstream media.

Those who call their use of violence a “job” are keeping themselves and all of us from carrying out the real job of every person alive: discovering how to live in peace by creative, nonviolent ways of dealing with one another and our difficulties. From Winston Churchill to four-star General Petraeus, we need to question and confront the overconfident leaders who seem to be oblivious to any other form of power than militarized empire.

We can only use means that themselves bring back to light the meaning of the person as they work toward ends with the same purpose. Those are the means of nonviolence. They alone allow us to resist the actions of our opponents, even to point out their follies, without diminishing them as persons. Nonviolence dignifies and humanizes as it works: it humanizes those who offer it, those to whom it is offered and the “reference publics” looking on.

There is a lot more to learn from Gandhi and other successful practitioners of nonviolent struggle, but this principle of humanity has to be in place for anything else to work.

We always have a choice. The cost for each year that we maintain one soldier in Afghanistan is twenty times greater than the cost of building a school.

The economic meltdown should be telling progressive-minded people that the time has come, not to shore up the old, top-heavy system that turned the wealth of the country into a vast gambling operation and exploited people and planet alike, but to create an economy that endures.

We who follow nonviolence have to point out what the mainstream media are missing in this "saffron revolution," as in many of the nonviolent episodes that have been accumulating with increasing frequency.

We who follow nonviolence have to point out what the mainstream media are missing in this “saffron revolution,” as they have missed in most episodes of nonviolence that have been accumulating with increasing frequency in this post-Gandhian world.

In the kind of spiritual progressive movement we seem to be groping for, we would be “joined at the heart” not only by our sense of common purpose, not only by the overview that we would be able to articulate, but by our rootedness in a new spiritual vision (which we could also articulate) of what it means to be human and alive on this planet. 

The new sciences support insights of the ancient mystics-that we are fundamentally interconnected, that the diversity of cultures provides "unlimited richness," and that each of us contain the seeds of the whole world order.

Thinking good thoughts is probably helpful, but certainly not the kind of force I am describing. The depth of psychological change I am referring to here cannot happen at an occasion. The battle has to be renewed every day – twice a day if one is going to be serious – and go on the rest of our life. It has little to do with pleasant thoughts or indeed any thoughts, and many daunting ancillary disciplines have to be added to sustain this practice and realize its full effects.

Science advances through a succession of paradigms, or frames of reference, which are often mutually irreconcilable. Without a definite shift in our educational perspective, we can hardly hope to effect a permanent shift in our worldview.