{"id":50997,"date":"2020-01-20T17:12:48","date_gmt":"2020-01-20T17:12:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wagingnonviolence.org\/metta\/?p=50997"},"modified":"2020-02-05T02:16:07","modified_gmt":"2020-02-05T02:16:07","slug":"king-was-at-the-forefront-of-a-new-vision-for-humanity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wagingnonviolence.org\/metta\/2020\/01\/king-was-at-the-forefront-of-a-new-vision-for-humanity\/","title":{"rendered":"King was at the forefront of a new vision for humanity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A version of this story was originally published by <\/em>Tikkun<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1936, a delegation of African Americans headed by Dr. Howard Thurman \u2014 a well-known figure of the Harlem Renaissance \u2014 called on Gandhi at his ashram in India. After hearing Gandhi speak, Mrs. Thurman pleaded, \u201cWe want you to come to America \u2026 We need you badly.\u201d Gandhi replied, \u201cHow I wish I could, but I would have nothing to give you unless I had given an ocular demonstration here of all that I have been saying. I must make good the message here, before I bring it to you.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was his principle of svadeshi<\/em>, or localism, which means you have to fulfill your work in your own circle of influence before trying to grow beyond it. With that in mind, Gandhi added a prophetic remark: \u201cWell \u2026 it may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence is delivered to the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Martin Luther King Jr. was seven years old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If anyone can be said to have brought the unadulterated message of nonviolence out to the wider world, it was he. The theory and practice of nonviolence have begun really to blossom in the last 30 or so years, and we can give a fairly concrete meaning to the term \u201cunadulterated,\u201d which Gandhi had called the \u201cnonviolence of the brave,\u201d or \u201cof the strong.\u201d In the field we call it principled nonviolence, or PNV, today, in contrast to strategic nonviolence or non-violence with a hyphen, meaning simply the absence of (physical) violence. Practitioners often explain that PNV is not just a technique but a way of life; I think it would be more accurate to say a state of mind. Even as you strongly reject injustice you are not hostile to those acting it out. These are the famous \u201ctwo hands of nonviolence\u201d of the late feminist and activist Barbara Deming: \u201cI will not put up with your injustice,\u201d but \u201cI\u2019m open to you as a human being.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The power of this balanced force was brought out by someone on the receiving end \u2014 the great British historian Arnold Toynbee, who said of Gandhi, \u201cHe made it impossible for us to go on ruling India. But he made it possible for us to leave without rancour and without humiliation.\u201d It\u2019s a law of political dynamics that\u2019s been discovered by all people of vision. According to a well-known hadith<\/em>, or saying of the Prophet Muhammed, he once challenged his followers that a Muslim must help everyone. Surely not an oppressor, they asked him. And when he insisted, yes, even an oppressor, they asked, how? He explained, \u201cBy preventing him from oppressing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Spiritual vision translates into political power, and nonviolence is the bridge. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where we are today with all this was clarified for me recently by a verse from the Bhagavad Gita (xvi.9): \u201cThose who hold the wrong view become the destroyers of the world.\u201d This is, alas, a perfect description of what we are now experiencing: the (militarily) most powerful nation in the world headed by a \u201cmalignant narcissist \u201d (an official diagnosis of the president) with a cult-like following who does seem hell bent not just on dominating the world (call that dictatorship 1.0) but destroying it, along with his colleagues in Brazil and elsewhere. And what, exactly, is their \u201cwrong view\u201d? The Gita explains, these people are lok\u0101yatas<\/em>, \u201cmaterialists.\u201d They are clinging to the prevailing paradigm, or old story (as it\u2019s now called), which has it that the universe consists of material particles that collide randomly to create somehow beings like us who have no overriding meaning, and no power to change this random order of things. Condemned, in other words, to the practices of consumerism, competition, and eventually the violence that is now reaching its extreme, the extinction of all life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grim as it sounds \u2014 and is \u2014 there\u2019s a slender hope. This violence, while it\u2019s arising from primordial impulses deep in the unconscious, is engaged and made active in the outside world by a \u201cwrong view.\u201d Views can be changed. But not, of course, by violence. Violence might get you changes in behavior, but if you want to win hearts and minds you need nonviolence, or love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

King\u2019s real importance lay therefore not only in the fact that he was an inspiring leader heading up a movement that changed history, or even the way increasing numbers are following his example around the world, but also that he was a visionary, a pioneer of the new story and therefore of human evolution. When he says that their movement would \u201cset our white brothers free\u201d in the nonviolent process of freeing themselves, he is not only engaging in a powerful strategy but witnessing the new vision behind that power. This can also be seen in other statements King made: <\/p>\n\n\n\n