Here in our circles “those over there” might be, for example, religious fundamentalists, right-wing radicals and Neo-Nazis, terrorists, globalizers, and sometimes also “the American government,” etc., etc. From rejection to demeaning and condemning, all the way to the wish and supposedly justifiable actions to make them disappear, there are but a few steps to which each and every one of us is capable.
This hasn’t just been proven again and again by the collective crimes of the last century, but also by the terrifyingly simple experiments of Milgram, and later of Zimbardo in the 1970s. During these experiments people like us became willing within hours or just a few days to commit severe acts of cruelty on test persons. Zimbardo’s results were recently directly confirmed in reports about the rapid onset of brutality among prison personnel throughout the entire world, and not just in Abu Ghraib.
What I’m leading to is this: We here are certainly not particularly special people, and most definitely not a collection of saints. We all tend to judge and condemn, sometimes overtly, often only subtly. And with each of these judgments we nourish the seeds of exclusion and collective blindness. Judging and condemning often relate at first only to ourselves, but subsequently go on to affect many others.
I would therefore like to propose that over these three days that we conduct a little mindfulness exercise: that every once in a while we pause to simply just observe how we’re seeing ourselves, and others. And if we recognize that we’re tending to make a judgment against ourselves or against others, that we then take a couple of good deep breaths, develop a feeling of friendliness and sympathy for ourselves and the others, put the judgments aside for the moment, and then perhaps sense the relief which comes from this. This is a wonderful little exercise, and in sum just as much a wonderful little contribution to dealing cleverly with the warlike potential in ourselves, and hence to collective wisdom in the best sense.
3. An element of collective wisdom which isn’t always explicitly named is, of course, non-violence. On one side, non-violence corresponds to our original nature, our original goodness, as the Buddhists say. It doesn’t take much, though, as was pointed out, to give up and lose the connection to this inner clarity.
Talking most competently on this subject will be Marshall Rosenberg – tonight after the evening break – whose life’s work is dedicated to non-violent communication. I don’t want to fail, however, to tell one of the many stories which remind us of the surprising options that we so often have in life. This story has been recounted by Tom Atlee (in “The Tao of Democracy”), whose task throughout his life has been the promotion of what he calls “co-intelligence.”
This story is about an actual occurrence concerning a sheep farmer in Indiana, who was being threatened by his new neighbor’s dogs. They had been running around free and were attacking and killing his sheep. The usual reaction by sheep farmers to such incidents, of course, consists of court action, barbed wire fences, or ultimately the use of firearms.
This man had a better idea: he presented baby lambs to his neighbor’s children as pets. Subsequently, the neighbor started voluntarily tying up his dogs, and after a while friendly contact began to develop between the two families.
[Seeds for Reflection] What other stories reflect these themes of non violence and co-intelligence? Please add your thoughts and comments below:
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