At some point we will have to talk about readily available weapons; at some point we’ll have to realize that a nation that engages in heartless drone warfare, torture, and extrajudicial killings cannot expect to live in peace. But until we liberate our minds from the endless pounding of violent imagery I fear we won’t be able to think clearly about those factors (or for that matter anything else).

After a roaring start, the Occupy movement hit a wall in the form of rough-handling and evictions by the police. Occupiers could have given up on nonviolence—as a small faction will always try to get us to do—or just given up; but instead we have gone back to the drawing board, while continuing to occupy select spaces, this time with advance training. This is exactly the right response.

If truth is the first victim in times of war and violence, women are a close second. It is not possible to have a violent society in which women are treated with respect.

There are spiritual laws in the universe, and they can be discovered, and used. Despite appearances, love flows in the heart of every human being.

The first lesson an awakened public should draw from the scenes at Berkeley and Davis is really that there’s no such thing as “appropriate” violence that can be contained in a corner and not spill out where we don’t want it—or more accurately, where we are forced to recognize what it really is.

There are patterns of growing sensitivity clearly discernible in all human communities over the long span of time — growth in what we might call moral awareness, or the awareness of connectedness among fellow beings (and, ultimately, the planet that nurtures us).

When Gandhi and virtually the whole leadership was arrested during the Salt Satyagraha of 1930 leadership devolved, successfully, onto every individual. This kind of leadership was one of Gandhi’s most striking achievements. His concept of “heart unity” — that if people want one another’s fulfillment they are one despite any differences of class, status, or whatever — applied to leadership.

If there is one thing characteristic of nonviolence, and a principle that we cannot forget, it is that the nonviolent vision, this form of struggle, awakens the humanity of oneself and one’s opponent. This renewed sense of connection is not merely a fruit of the tree of nonviolence, it is its very core and our highest victory, because from it will emerge new ideals, stronger communities and healthy children.

While the Occupy movement today seems to be just a continuation of the style that is “dispersed, inchoate, and fiercely independent. It has no manifesto or doctrine, no overriding authority to check with.” Can #Occupy provide the framework that will pull these far-flung but inwardly resonant energies together—and in so doing become a force that could, in Gandhi’s terms, “o’ersweep the world”?

These prevailing narratives of militarism revolve around the powerful archetype of good and evil, order vs. chaos; but they can be overcome by an even more powerful myth, if you will (I taught mythology for many years at U.C. Berkeley), which is the struggle for life itself against death.

The movement has empowered youth (and others) in their hundreds of thousands to demonstrate in some 1,500 locations in 82 countries, creating in the process a beautiful culture of consensus decision making. But that was the easy part. Now it is time to overturn and replace the obnoxious institutions and behaviors that have (at last) brought us together

As the Occupy movements grow in remarkably inspiring ways, they have a unique opportunity to raise the human image from the slander and propaganda of the corporate media—where our capacity for consumption defines us and our desire for wealth drives us—to a more promising, and far more accurate conception of what makes us truly human: our capacity for nonviolence, motivated by our most precious desire for freedom.

There is no limit to how small movements can start if they stay true to their cause, if it is just; and to their vision, if it is sufficiently inspiring, for if those conditions were met they would inevitably grow.

Military intervention is designed to kill, not to save life. We are see the futility of training, arming, and ordering men and women to kill and expecting them to stay within agreed upon rules—not to mention go on to build stable regimes. At some point we need to recognize that there is a terrible simplicity about life: destructive energy is destructive, positive energy is positive.

The entire system of war and militarism will have to be replaced by nonviolent equivalents—and they do exist—if we want our democracy to be real.

It is a struggle to liberate all of us from the humiliating image of the human being—one that’s sustained by the endless propaganda of our powerful mass media—and replace it with something more beautiful and much more true, something that will help us accomplish the “great turning” from revenge to reconciliation, from fear to generosity and compassion.

In the penetrating light of Gandhi’s vision, passivity and violence are really two sides of the same coin. On the spiritual plane, they emerge respectively from fear and anger—both drives of the private, separate self. The only really different coin is that of nonviolence, or selfless love in action (to paraphrase Martin Luther King). The only meaningful choice, then, is not between intervening (with blind force) or not intervening, but between violence and nonviolence as a guiding principle.

Hope is still there, but we’ve been looking in the wrong place. It’s not to be found in a politician elected to high office, for however good a person he (or she—God forbid!) may be. That person will be constrained by an extremely corrupt and even vicious system. It is hidden inside the box of human potentials where we have not been able to see it through the crowd of troubles fluttering around the lid.

There is a way out of this dehumanizing dilemma, and that is to rise up and say, “No!” War is not a necessary evil, nor indispensable activity. It is a horror and a travesty on human nature.

This country is famous for one of the most organized and inspiring nonviolent movements in modern history. It unfolded sixty years ago in the aftermath of the Holocaust in Europe and focused on the racism that was an unresolved legacy of the Civil War. It was brilliant, but sadly, not enough.