**
Vimala Thakar
"A tender, loving concern for all living creatures will need to arise and reign in our hearts, if any of us are to survive. And our lives will be truly blessed only when the misery of one is genuinely felt to be the misery of all. The force of love is the force of total revolution. It is the unreleased force, unknown and unexplored as a dynamic of change."
From Wikipedia:
Vimala Thakar's philosophy was influenced by the nonviolent social change philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi and Vinoba Bhave. She sought to reconcile the often-separated worlds of spirituality and social action, arguing that in fact each is indispensable to the other:
"In this era, to become a spiritual inquirer without social consciousness is a luxury that we can ill afford, and to be a social activist without a scientific understanding of the inner workings of the mind is the worst folly. Neither approach in isolation has had any significant success."
Conclusion
Fruitfulness vs. Effectiveness
Citing the mixed results that nonviolent social change movements have achieved, one can always argue against their effectiveness. Yet, from a social science perspective, evidence has been mounting over the last century that nonviolence may be more effective than violence. One study from 2011 assembled a comprehensive data set of 323 violent and nonviolent campaigns between 1900 and 2006; it found that nonviolent campaigns were nearly twice as likely to achieve full or partial success as were violent campaigns.
However, there is another way of looking at civil resistance: substituting the concept of effectiveness with that of "fruitfulness" - the idea of fruitfulness being an agricultural metaphor. Without diminishing the importance of affecting oppressive social institutions in the present, fruitfulness includes the reality that nonviolent action is taking place within a context of some 5,000 years of authoritarian systems - (see Power Matters, 1 and 2).
Nonviolent social action, in addition to the goal of changing current conditions, will also be planting seeds of a new way of being and this growth process takes time. Such seeds are evident in the effect that Gandhi's ideas and actions have exerted on future leaders - in the U.S., Vietnam, Burma, South Africa and Tibet.
At the same time, we must recognize the inevitability that advances will be followed by reverses. The social climate in which we are living makes this inevitable. As Riane Eisler put it:
"In the last few centuries, the partial shift from a dominator to a partnership society has partly freed humanity, allowing some movement toward a more just and equalitarian society. But at the same time there has been a strong countermovement both on the left and the right, to more deeply entrench the dominator society."
Given the advance of authoritarianism and oligarchy across the planet in the present era, we should expect that the transformation of society will involve more than one generation. We need to be in it for the long haul.
Gandhi found a way of mobilizing the courage, integrity, the activism of large numbers of people. Will we be able to do the same in our time: to arouse the moral courage of the many in the face of control by the few? It is uncertain. Gandhi suggested that the most fruitful approach is offering our full and passionate effort without clinging to the result. As Gandhi put it: "Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment; full effort is full victory."
It is also essential to recognize that the transformation of self is embedded in and integral to "soul force." This transformation can be described as a secret weapon, a movement from self to selflessness in the best sense - the offering of our life to something higher than ourselves.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
2
1
