Please join me in warmly
welcoming Charles Eisenstein. [CLAPPING]
[SIGHS] Really good to see you again,
Tyler. And the rest of you. [LAUGHING]
I have a vivid memory of Tyler.
Um, he lived with us for a little
while in our house.
And I have -- a little bit much there. Have
a vivid memory of him.
Uh...our son Cary was maybe two or three years old singing the Cat in the Hat to him
and accompanying himself on the guitar.
And I don't think Cary remembers that,
but I'm sure it made an imprint. [LAUGHING]
Yeah. So --
Yeah. So, I'm talking today about building a
peace narrative. And the word narrative is
bandied about a lot today,
so that it's almost become a cliche,
but I think a lot in terms of narrative
because the stories that we tell
ourselves about ourselves and about
the world are what can organize us and
cohere us toward a common purpose.
Because a lot of the things that we need
to do today don't make sense if you're
the only one doing them.
But if there is a story about
the world that we want to create,
then we kind of understand that yeah,
I'm doing my part and it makes sense
as part of this larger happening.
Now maybe this larger
happening is something bigger
than any story that we could
make about it.
But for me,
the story that allows me to make meaning
of my life and allows me to identify my
allies and allows me to understand what
my role is in this bigger happening is essential.
So this -- this understanding of narrative is, uh --
extends to all parts of
a political spectrum.
Adolph Hitler understood narrative very
well and was very successful in creating
a narrative of racial superiority and so
on and so forth that allowed the German
people to identify themselves and the role they played in wreaking tremendous suffering on earth.
So it's important if we want to serve a world of peace and wellbeing for all people,
a world of healing where society and
all the beings on this planet are moving
toward greater wholeness, we better make
sure that we're telling the right story.
Today the dominant narrative,
whether we recognize it or not,
is a war narrative,
not only on the obvious
level of US foreign policy,
identifying enemies around the world
and bombing them, but also in our,
in our basic understanding of how the
world works and how to solve problems.
War thinking is woven so deeply into our
psyche that if we want to build a peace
narrative on a,
on a foundation of peace,
maybe we need to identify the
existing foundation of our narratives,
which is a war narrative. So I want
to spend a little time unearthing, uh,
excavating and removing the war
narrative. So that, and then I'm,
then I'm gonna say maybe a bit about
the foundations of a peace narrative and
then I'll move on to the
building components and the --
the architecture of a peace narrative.
So I -- in preparing for this lecture,
I read a beautiful essay by
the Christian Theologian,
Walter Wink,
called the myth of redemptive violence.
Redemptive violence basically being the
idea that the way to make a better world
is to destroy something,
to kill something, to kill
evil, to extricate evil,
to overcome the forces of evil and
chaos with the forces of good and order.
He traces it back to a
Babylonian creation myth
over 3000 years old.
Where originally you had the
god Adsu and the goddess Tiamat,
and there they were all by themselves.
And so they got bored.
And so they decided to have kids
and they had a whole bunch of kids,
but it wasn't long
before they kind of regretted it
because the kids were
making too much noise. [LAUGHING]
That's what it says in the myth basically.
And so they decided of course,
that they were going to kill all
their children. Right, problem solved.
So I mean, maybe if you're a god, you're
allowed to do this. But they did.
Anyway, the children got wind of this and they decided that they would solve the problem by killing their parents.
And so first they finished off Adsu.
That wasn't too hard,
but Tiamat that was a different story.
None of them dared to face Tiamat
until the youngest of the children,
Marduk volunteered. I'll,
I will destroy Tiamat,
our mother, on condition that
you all brothers and sisters,
you all make me the supreme
ruler of the universe. [LAUGHING]
So,
I'll leave it to your imagination to
draw parallels to US foreign policy and stuff.  But --
I'll just say so, okay, Marduk
then he comes up with a plan.
He blows poison gas into
the stomach of Tiamat,
stabs her with a spear and she explodes --
all her guts and blood spew out
And from these, um, from her body parts,
he constructs the world that we live
in today. So this creation myth,
uh, basically comes through the
misogynistic killing of the great mother,
um,
and who was identified with
chaos and the wild and truly in,
in these, um, ancient civilizations,
good was associated with order.
The king was the incarnation of good,
conquering the beasts,
killing the lions,
cutting down the forests.
That goes back to the epic of Gilgamesh,
cutting down the forests,
bringing civilization to the barbarians,
bringing domestication to the wild.
And you could see maybe even today
that we're kind of doing the same thing,
taking the pieces of a ruined Gaia and
building our civilization out of them,
building the world out
of the destroyed mother.
So this is
one of the roots of the war
narrative that so immerses us today.
I would trace it back even maybe
even deeper. I just mentioned the,
the ancient civilizations where,
where good was associated
with order and conquest.
It also extends to the,
um,
basic metaphysics that we live in today,
which is called science or which is
embedded in science that essentially says.
that, um,
the tendency of the
universe is toward entropy.
It's toward disorder.
And it is only by imposing
our design onto this chaotic,
disorderly and degenerating universe
that we are able to maintain a realm fit
fit for human habitation;
that we are able to impose
good upon -- upon chaos.
So -- so if,
if you accept that and if you accept
that nature itself does not have any
inherent intelligence,
any inherent
tendency toward complexity, toward the
emergence of beauty and organization,
if you accept that, then
we are fundamentally at war
with nature all the time.
Subject at any moment to being
extinguished by random natural forces.
And so our wellbeing in that view comes
through imposing more and more control
on this wild, arbitrary,
random nature that is
outside of ourselves.
So this is another kind of war
thinking that you can see is
really resonant with the fight
against the enemy in other ways.
And it comes up in pretty much any
realm of human endeavor that is,
um, part of civilization. So for example,
um, it's a, it's a problem solving
template that goes as follows:
first, identify the cause of the problem --
the culprit, the
perpetrator.
Then, control, imprison
keep away or kill,
humiliate, destroy the -- bad guy,
the culprit,
the cause,
and then all will be well.
And the better able we are to do this,
the better human life is going to be.
Walter Wink gives the example
of Popeye. Popeye, the sailor,
which, uh, the plot in
every episode is the same.
Brutus goes and kidnaps
Olive Oil. Uh, and,
and Popeye tries to rescue her and
is beaten to a pulp by Brutus.
And then at the last minute he pops a
can of spinach and he gets really strong.
And then he beats, beats Brutus to a
pulp just before he can rape Olive Oil.
That's the plot of Popeye.
Nobody...and he points out,
nobody ever learns anything
from this encounter. [LAUGHING]
Nobody -- nobody grows in it.
And the lesson is
that the way to solve a problem is
to overcome the entity with force.
So you can see this not only in obvious
ways, I mean that's the mentality of war,
but also in agriculture.
So if you have a problem,
like your crop yields are declining,
you identify the cause, the,
there's weeds in the field.
And the solution is to kill the weeds. Or maybe you're getting strep throat,
and, what's the cause?
Let's find the pathogen.
That's the orientation. Find the
pathogen. Ah, streptococcus bacteria.
Solution? Antibiotics, kill it.
Problem? Maybe a problem is -- is crime.
Well obviously crime is
caused by criminals, right?
So if we lock up the criminals,
then we won't have any more crime.
Terrorism,
obviously it's caused by terrorists.
So let's kill the terrorists. No
more terrorism. Problem solved.
So you can see how -- or even if --
if you're trying to be a better person
or you want to be more effective in the world
and, and you're
procrastinating, you know,
and you're and, you're lazy and
you're addicted to something.
Well here's the bad guy to attack.
Here's something to control.
Maybe you're overweight and you think,
oh, it's because I'm eating too much.
So that's the cause the
bad guy is the calories,
the solution is to control that.
So this war thinking is nearly universal.
The war on the other and the war on the self too,
Because there's a sneaking suspicion
that you're one of the bad guys.
In fact, this is an, uh, an
explicit teaching of, um,
biology and economics. At least
up until quite recently,
where -- where it was believed
that behavior -
human and otherwise - is motivated
by reproductive self interest;
your genes --
that's built into you.
And in order to be anything
other than ruthlessly selfish,
you have to overcome nature.
So there's a war mentality also.
Now,
you can see the problem here when
we are waging a war on the symptoms,
on weeds, criminals, terrorists, um,
calories, over-eating and so forth,
which is that if these are not actually
the cause, but they themselves are a symptom
then the true cause is going
an unexamined and unchanged.
Like,
why does Brutus want to kidnap Olive Oil?
If you don't unearth that,
then you're going to be
fighting Brutus all the time.
Why are the weeds growing in the field?
Once you ask that question,
then war of thinking no longer
gives you the answers.
And it might be because there's a,
um,
there's a lack of biodiversity in the
field or that the soil is depleted in some
way and those weeds are coming actually
to repair the soil
because there's an intelligence in nature.
Why,
why is there crime?
Is it because those criminals are just
bad or are they acting from the totality
of their circumstances? Are there
economic reasons? Are the reasons of,
of a legacy of institutional racism?
A loss of meaning in life?
So war of thinking is in all cases,
a simplifying and reducing narrative.
In fact,
to wage war,
you pretty much have to reduce the enemy.
You have to dehumanize the enemy.
It's a universal tactic in war.
To to make them - THEM,
make them less than fully human.
If you want to kill somebody,
that is a key enabling method.
If you want to exploit somebody.
As war of thinking infiltrates
our political culture,
I'm seeing more and more of that,
um,
dehumanizing or demonizing the other side
And constructing narratives that serve
the dehumanization of the other side.
And this comes up all the time in --
in political discourse,
the thought
and the, the, the
statement, how could they?
It's totally unjustified to accuse our
opponents of some deficiency in their
core humanness. They're
stupid, they're ignorant,
they're immoral, they're
entitled, they're greedy,
Those greedy corporate executives.
And then this narrative gets weaponized
because we then use it to arouse the
indignation of our side.
To -- to stir up -- to incite war fever so that we
can rise up and destroy those bad guys.
I was recently on a podcast where -- where,
you know,
speaking about the more beautiful
world our hearts know is possible,
speaking about ecological
healing, regenerative
agriculture and things like that,
which has been a major theme
for me in the last year.
And -- and the interviewer said, well Charles,
what would you say to this?
The -- the power elite; they're never going to
change. They're benefiting from this.
They're happy with this and,
and they're not going to change.
So in order to change them, we're going
to have to somehow bring them down.
We're going to have to rise up in bloody
revolution and make them change because they're not going to change.
[SIGHS] So,
let's first assume that that's true.
If that's true,
then
our hope lies in overcoming them by force
because they're not going to change by themselves.
They like it
this way. They're the enemy.
They're the bad guy.
We have the formula for creating change when there's a bad guy,
it's in all the movies. It's
in, it's not just Popeye,
it's in Batman,
it's in the Lion King.
It's in pretty much every action movie
you've ever seen. It's in Star Wars.
You kill Darth Vader, you kill
the emperor, you destroy evil.
And that's kind of unrealistic.
If it comes to a contest of force,
who has more force?
Who has more military power?
Is it us hippies and peaceniks? [LAUGHING]
Or, is it Tyler? [LAUGHING]
I mean he does have an
intimidating presence, but still. [LAUGHING]
Or is it the military industrial,
pharmaceutical,
medical, educational, NGO,
prison, industrial complex? [LAUGHING]
Did I leave some out? Yeah. Financial.
Um.
They have the -- they have the
guns. They have the money,
They have the surveillance state. They have the police,
They have the control of the media.
So if -- if it comes down to a contest
of force, they're going to win.
In fact, even if we talk about the
force of propaganda and the
force of a narrative
and we try to ignite the,
the rage and indignation of
the oppressed against them --
guess what?
They are even more adept at manipulating
narratives and making you look bad
because they control the media.
They're doing it right now.
Creating narratives that are
more ubiquitous and have a
farther reach and more PR,
advertising energy behind them --
more money behind them than yours do.
So this is probably a recipe for
failure unless you become so good at the
technologies of war that
you do tear them down.
You do defeat the bad guys and now you're
in power -- and the fight hasn't ended.
They're still bad guys out there.
And in order to defeat those bad guys,
you need to consolidate your power
because you know the world is
going to be better if you do that.
George Orwell described this very,
very clearly in 1984:
the goal of the party is power.
The justification is that they're
going to create a perfect world,
and in order to do that, they have to
have complete power. What is power?
Power is the ability
to make others suffer.
So you end up becoming evil yourself.
You end up --
because part of the technology is to
demonize the enemy and not let anything
into the narrative that is
going to humanize the enemy.
That does not serve the war effort.
To let in something that maybe it's true,
but it's going to make
Donald Trump look good.
So I better not endorse a
single thing that he's done,
which actually sometimes it
seems kind of hard to find, but,
but,
but you know, you see the same thing
play out in, in a fighting couple,
a divorcing couple. And if, and if one of
them comes to you and he's your friend,
and first she did this and then she
did that and can you believe it?
And how could she? And what they want
is for you to endorse that narrative.
You're not going to say, well, you know,
she actually did dah, dah, dah, dah.
like that doesn't serve the war.
So two scenarios, either one is that
you lose, that's the most likely.
And that's why so many activists fall
into despair because the powers
are too great or you win,
which is the same.
[Audience laughing]
Yeah, the science fiction writer, uh,
Phillip K. Dick put it really well, um,
in Valis. At one point he
wrote to defeat the empire.
No,
let me start again.
To fight the empire is to be
infected with its derangement.
This is a paradox.
Whoever defeats a segment of
the empire becomes the empire.
It proliferates like a virus
imposing its form on its enemies,
thereby it becomes its enemies.
So if you go to war against war --
if you go to war against the empire,
you have actually become
part of the empire.
And George Orwell illustrated this too,
when I don't know how many of you are familiar
with the book, but the main character,
Winston,
he gets recruited into the --
or he thinks he's being recruited
into the resistance. And it's actually --
uh -- he's actually being entrapped,
but he thinks he's being recruited into
the resistance. And he's asked, you know,
how committed are you to
overthrowing the party?
Would you be willing to do anything?
Would you be willing to commit sabotage?
Would you be willing to commit mass
murder if it served the overthrow of the party?
Would you be willing to throw
acid in a child's face? And he says, yes,
and therefore,
he is revealed as actually having the
same mindset as the party --
to do anything to gain power.
To do anything to overthrow evil.
So this illustrates,
well, it leads me to --
to offer a general principle that in
any fight -- and more and more of our
political discourses has become a fight --
in any fight where there's two sides
opposing each other, pushing each
other, fighting with each other,
the resolution lies in the things
that are hidden by the fight,
the things that both sides agree on
without even knowing. And the questions that night side is asking.
So, for example,
in the,
in the fight over immigration,
one side is very much in the
war thinking, keep them out,
keep the bad immigrants out.
Immigration is harming us and let's
keep them out. The other side is like,
that's really inhumane. We're
separating families.
We should welcome people.
Nobody's asking in the dominant culture,
nobody's asking why are
there so many immigrants?
What has made life in
Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua,
El Salvador,
and so forth,
so unbearable that people are willing to
risk their lives and leave their homes
and leave their families, risk their
children's lives for a totally uncertain future.
What would it take for you to do that?
It's an uncomfortable question --
first, because it takes us
outside of the familiar
war paradigm of problem solving.
When we're accustomed to that,
we want to find like if
all I have is a hammer,
you look for nails and you start to
see things that aren't nails as nails,
because here's your tool.
So it's uncomfortable in that way
because we don't know what to do anymore.
And secondly,
the answer to that question of why they're
immigrating has to do with ourselves.
So no enemy anymore to fight
because, oh, we're kind of the ...
we're involved in it. We're all
in this together, you could say,
And that's really uncomfortable.
If you are a pacifist or a peacemaker,
you may find that you arouse a lot of
hostility from both sides of a conflict.
When you gain your identity and your
sense of being a good person from being on
team good in the war against team evil,
then you actually need team evil.
You need the other side.
That that props up -
It's like, you know, two,
two cards leaning against each
other and keeping each other up.
You need team evil to validate your
identity. The pacifist challenges --
challenges the identity of both sides
and arouses more hostility than the enemy does.
Pacifists are -- are more hated,
more despised than the enemy.
Okay.
So I don't want to take too much time
talking about the war narrative because I
want to talk about [inaudible]
a peace narrative.
Btu just to say, just, you know,
I've just been illustrating how deep it
goes and how pervasive it is.
I mean it goes all the way down
to, to cosmology, to,
to physics. Um, and I would
say it's obsolete physics.
Uh,
this has become clear with,
with the discovery and research on,
uh, emergence
self organizing systems which
are ubiquitous in nature.
The world actually has a tendency
toward order, towards beauty,
as if there were an
intelligence in all things.
It's obsolete biology,
the selfish gene.
Symbiosis. Cooperation. The merger of -- fo
individuals into greater and greater and
greater wholes, an ascent of complexity.
That's how biology works.
Genes, well, okay, I'm not going to go too
much into that, in fact, not at all.
But um, there's a, Neo-Lamarckian resurgence
that in biology that, okay, I'm not gonna
even go there, but I'm just going to say,
but it is part of a peace narrative -- that
nature is not one gigantic war of each against all.
As Rudolf Steiner put it.
But that cooperation and symbiosis
are evolutionary forces as well.
So
I said before that,
now I want to lay a little bit
of a foundation of a peace narrative.
So I said before that the,
the essence of war is reduction,
the reduction of,
of the universe -- of life to thing,
for example,
the reduction of other people to enemy,
the simplification of complexity
so that there is a thing to fight.
Well, therefore, if we want
to build a peace narrative,
the first foundational pillar
would be holistic thinking.
To understand
that -- everything is intimately
related to everything else.
That everything is a part of everything
else. To use a Buddhist terminology,
a Buddhist term,
um,
that to exist is to be in relationship.
That we are not separate individuals,
but we are inter dependent for our very
existence that we are inter existent.
Therefore,
any enemy that --
anything that we see as an enemy is a
reflection of something in ourselves
and is the product of a
constellation of relationships.
From that place we seek to
understand the relationships.
So if you are getting strep throat a lot,
you seek to understand well,
how is the bacteria
part of my body ecology?
What are the conditions?
What are the totality of the
relationships that have brought this --
this symptom into visibility?
And in fact it could be because of a
disruption in body ecology because now if you're healthy --
you have these friendly bacteria that
secrete substances that suppress
the pathogenic bacteria.
If you take a lot of antibiotics,
then you're killing off the
friendly bacteria in your,
in your mucus membranes
leaving you more susceptible.
It's like when you bomb the terrorists,
you create conditions for
even more terror to grow.
And when you lock up the criminals and
destroy families and destroy communities,
you're creating conditions that breed
even more crime. Same principle here.
And when you look through a holistic
lens -- through a lens of interdependency
and interrelationship, then these, uh,
base conditions that breed all of the
things we go to war against become visible. And --
we no longer then default
to fighting something.
And I want to say just before I move
on to the second pillar that I'm not,
I'm not maintaining here that there's
never a time to fight something.
That there's never a time to use
antibiotics, that there's never a time, maybe to --
like maybe you theoretically know that
this person is about to beat your child
because he suffered childhood
trauma himself and so forth.
But maybe in this moment that doesn't
help you and your only response that you
can see is to intervene forcefully.
The problem is, is when we --
instead of waiting until
we've tried everything else,
we default to a fight first because we're
so used to seeing the world in terms of good and evil.
So a fight becomes the default -- the reflexive response.
When we can understand the conditions
that generate the behavior that we are fighting against --
then there are other options.
The option of changing those conditions.
This leads to the second pillar,
which I'll call compassion.
Compassion comes from --
so it's not like the superior person
indulgently patronizingly tolerating or
sympathizing with the the
condition of the inferior person.
Compassion is basically --
feeling what it's like
to be somebody else.
The experience of identifying
with somebody else and
knowing what it's like to be them.
It comes from the question,
what is it like to be you?
What are the conditions that
have made you into who you are?
And how can I participate in the,
in the evolution of those conditions?
To see these conditions for most
people growing up in this society,
it requires some deprogramming --
deprogramming from condemnation from --
from,
"which side are you on?" From judgment --
judgment in the sense that,
I mean judgment -- judgment is,
if I were you, I wouldn't have
done that. I'm better than you.
Or maybe I'm worse than you.
Usually it's I'm better than you.
I wouldn't have done that.
I had a former colleague,
I was talking about this
stuff and, and, and how
the stuff about the conditions for crime
and understanding, you know, that crime
is a symptom of something
else. And she was like, yeah,
but that's not true for
the white supremacists.
I can understand why some,
you know,
black kid who grew up in the ghetto
would turn to crime when there's no other
economic opportunities and he's
been traumatized and stuff.
But those white supremacists look at
those guys with their bellies hanging out
over their belts,
in their tee shirts and their hats.
So entitled,
they've got no excuse
to be the way that they are.
We're just waiting for someone to
hate aren't we? Here's the entity,
here's someone where we can let loose
and to define ourselves as good.
I saw a few years ago,
there was this biker gang riot in Texas where they,
you know,
rival gangs, started beating
each other up.
The police came, -- they started beating up the police.
It was just like this
horrendous violent incident.
And on Salon magazine.com
there were the mugshots the or,
or the, the photographs of these men
who were involved in this incident.
And they chose like the most,
um,
contemptible, unflattering
pictures you could imagine.
And the sub headline should have been,
here's someone you can hate.
Here's the bad guy.
And so we get these simplifying narratives
where like the problem of racism,
it would sure be nice if it could be
solved by just identifying the racists.
If it were a matter of individual attitudes,
bad people --
but it's woven so much deeper
into our society than that,
that -- that the,
that approach will not ever work.
And it only results in strengthening
the basic psychic template of racism,
which is --
is dehumanization.
Racism is dehumanization and it will not
be solved by dehumanizing the racists.
If you -- that might feel good,
you get to be on team good.
But is that what you are serving?
Or are you serving the healing of racism?
And are you willing to sacrifice
identity of being on the moral,
ethical, right side in order
to serve healing on Earth?
This is the third pillar.
The third pillar is to end the internal
war and to develop a peace narrative inside of ourselves.
And to end the conflict
that arises when we serve
being right;
when we serve establishing
our identity as a good person.
The best, easiest way to establish
your identity as a good person is
in contrast to the evil people.
So,
are you willing to give that up?
Are you willing to give up
having been right all along?
How much do you care about peace?
It's said that you can only serve one
master. You cannot serve two masters.
Temporarily,
you can,
you can serve peace and at the same
time serve getting the approval of your in group
You can serve peace and at the same time
serve your identity as a good person.
You can serve peace and at the same
time serve your goal of being heard,
of being seen, being recognized,
of being seen as a leader,
of believing yourself to be moral
of having a self image like that.
You can serve both for awhile,
but sometime eventually the generosity
of the universe is such that you will
reach a choice point where you get
to decide what you really serve,
and you then need to make a sacrifice.
And this can be a bitter pill to swallow,
you know,
this,
this   strategy of war,
so pervasive.
Maybe you get upset about GMO seeds and,
and Monsanto, which is now Bayer, um,
vigorously spreading
GMOs around the world.
Destroying peasant agriculture,
corrupting entire governments, uh,
to accept,
uh,
the next iteration of
industrial agriculture,
patenting seeds and varieties that were
developed by indigenous cultures and so
on and, and, okay, we've got to stop
this. How are we going to do it?
Well,
in the mentality of war,
first thing we got to do is identify
somebody as, as, as the bad guys. And
it would be the Monsanto executives.
Why are they doing that? How could they?
If I were them, I wouldn't do that, would I?
I wouldn't make those decisions.
If I were a fracking executive,
I wouldn't destroy the -- and
pollute the waters like that.
All for what? For my greed?
I can't believe those people.
Let's -- let's arouse some hatred.
Let's tear those fuckers down.
That's the strategy.
Imagine that you are a Monsanto executive
and here everybody is talking
about how greedy you are,
how horrible you are,
and you're like,
I walk my neighbors dog when they're
on vacation. Uh, I work really hard.
My colleagues respect
me, um, and Im, and I'm,
I'm a fracking executive,
maybe I'm...
building America's energy independence.
In their story, they're the good guys
and you seem ridiculous.
You are in fact ---
offering yourself as the bad guy by
the way that you see them and relate to them.
Well, what's the alternative?
What's the alternative?
I gave those two scenarios where you
defeat - where you either get defeated by
the military industrial, etc. complex,
or you overcome them and become the
new complex. What's the alternative?
The alternative comes from different
premises. The premise being that --
that comes from an understanding
of the situation. That --
starts by asking, well, why is somebody greedy or why is
somebody feeling so good about fracking?
What story informs their,
their belief system and
what state of being?
Like where does greed come from anyway?
Greed is another one of those symptoms.
Just like strep. It's a symptom
of an experience of scarcity.
It's a hunger that can never be met by
the objects that are offered to feed it.
If somebody is cut off from
community, cutoff, from nature,
cutoff from meaning in their lives,
they're going to be hungry for that and
instead of that, what's offered is money,
prestige, possessions, power. Okay,
I'll take that,
but if you can look at
the person that you call an enemy
and see in them that actually
they want on a deep level,
they want what you want
and what all people want.
They want to contribute their
gifts to a more beautiful world,
to a healed world,
that they want to be generous,
that they are here for a
purpose beyond themselves.
If you can see that,
then you're able to speak to that.
Then you're able to create
an invitation to that.
One of my mottos is that the story that
we hold about a person is an invitation for them to step into that story.
Reminds me of the story of Julio Diaz.
This guy in New York, you know, um,
maybe he was Puerto Rican origin,
can't remember,
but he takes the subway home every day,
gets off a stop early in Queens or
whatever to buy a burrito at his favorite
burrito store. And then he walks
home and one day he gets off,
he's going to the burrito store and a
mugger um, holds him up at knifepoint.
Give me your wallet, oh, okay.
Gives him his wallet and he
says, hey kid, it's cold out.
Do you want my jacket too?
And the guy is - what can you say?
It's like, uh, okay. He
gives him his jacket.
He says, hey, I was about to go get a
burrito. It's a really good burrito store. You want to come with me?
What can you say? He comes with him. [LAUGHING'
And then they're, you know, at
the counter and he says, you know,
I would treat you to the burrito
but you've got my wallet.
[Audience laughing]
Can I have my wallet back? He gives
him his wallet. And give me the knife, too.
He gives him his knife.
That would not have been possible if
he had seen that teenager as a bad guy.
But he was able,
even with a knife in his face,
he was able to see something else.
That is the power of the stories
that we hold about each other.
They can generate miracles.
Now I'm not offering that as a formula.
If someone holds you up,
you know you can't,
you can't say that unless
you actually see it.
And that takes practice.
To see it, you have to look for it.
To look for it, you have to be willing to put down the benefits you get from holding others as
enemies or as lesser than,
as other -- as less conscious than you.
Less enlightened than you. Less spiritual
than you. Less ethical than you.
You have to be willing to put that down if you're going to see something else,
you have to put down the
judgments. Those are a cloud,
a distorting cloud that that reduces
people to the image of the judgements
and does not create an opportunity or an
invitation for them to be anything else.
So you have to be willing to put
that down and to put that down,
how do you do that?
Is that a fight against yourself?
Is that an effort of will?
No.
That comes from understanding
where those judgments come from,
like why do we have such a need to
establish ourselves as the good guys?
That comes from a wound.
It's a wound of self rejection.
And that wound also is
part of war thinking.
It's built into school, it's built into
parenting, it's built into religion,
it's built, it's -- it's also
very ubiquitous in our culture.
Anytime if you're a parent, anytime
you look at your child with contempt,
why did you do that? How could
you? You're basically conveying, "you're bad",
and it's never an honest question.
"Why did you do that?" It's usually,
well almost never, it's a condemnation,
but if you made it an honest question,
then you'd be getting somewhere.
Why did you do that?
Help me to understand
because I know who you are.
Help me to understand,
Monsanto executive. Help me
to understand, Donald Trump.
Maybe you don't ask that person
specifically, but that's the orientation.
That's the looking for what Julio Diaz
was able to see and then to be able to invite.
So those are some
foundations of a peace narrative.
The building blocks,
the construction components.
Those are things like stories --
stories that help people understand
what it is like to be an immigrant,
what it is like to be a racist, what
it is like to be a corporate executive,
what is like to live in a ghetto.
So many of our political stances would
not be able to operate if we really knew
what it was like to be somebody else.
And these stories need to be presented
in a way that they can be heard.
Not with a secret agenda of making
you feel ashamed and humiliated,
of how much harm you've caused.
That's another form of warfare.
And I'm not -
Shame and humiliation have a place .
When you feel ashamed, you know your
face flushes. Really what shame is,
it's the breakdown of a self image.
It dissolves and the chemical bonds,
the psychic chemical bonds
that held it together,
they release heat and
they free up energy. And
in order to go there and not just
defend and hold that image together,
boy, it really helps to know that you're loved.
It helps to feel safe and so these
stories are so much more powerful when
they're presented and held in a way
where people feel safe to hear them,
that you're not trying to attack
them and you trust them. You Trust.
I know it's hard for you to
go through this humiliation.
I'm here for you, -- my brother, my sister.
I'm here for you.
We're in this together. That's a peace narrative.
We are in this together.
Another component of building a peace
narrative is is our words and how we use them.
A lot of the English language --
subtly or not so subtly suggests
and facilitates dehumanization.
And war of thinking --
words like inexcusable. But what do
you actually mean by inexcusable?
You mean well, some bad actions
have an excuse, they're justified.
Justifiable is another one.
And some just have no excuse.
And if they have no excuse, you only
did that because you're a bad person.
So that, that would be an example
of -- of smuggling war of thinking.
Even if you're wielding those
epithets of greedy and inexcusable and
unjustifiable and evil,
immoral -
at the warmongers.
But what you're really trying to
do is to wage a war to end all war.
We tried that already.
It was called World War I.
Yeah.
So maybe say one more one --
one more thing.
I'm probably getting
low on time. Um --
yeah this is not to be like the language police
because as any of you have practiced,
studied,
nonviolent communication,
know the formula for NVC
can be used very violently.
It depends on the intention
behind it. So you can, you know --
yeah so I'm not like, you know,
like an agent of the PC word police,
like extending the realm of my patrol to,
to any word that might,
you know,
humiliate somebody or make
somebody feel bad or um,
encourage a dehumanization of somebody.
But the reason to point attention to these
is to bring attention to the state of being
and the state of perception that is
underneath these words to make us alert to
how we carry war of thinking
within ourselves.
And when we take note of
that and heal the wounds,
the wounds of self rejection,
for example, the wound of alienation,
of being cut off from community and
nature and intimate participation in the
material world and all
these other forms of,
of cutoff that we have
undergone through trauma.
When we begin to heal those
and no longer see through the lens of --
of enemies and good guys and bad guys,
good and evil,
right and wrong,
then we no longer --
no longer feels good to use those words.
It feels inconsistent with who
I am and who I want to become.
So -- yeah, so those are some of
the building blocks to --
and then so to use to use words,
to use stories that foster understanding,
that induce people to ask
or to wonder or to consider.
What is it like to be you?
What are the conditions that
generate the things that are hurting --
hurting so much when I see them?
War of thinking in a way it's a
way to maintain the status quo.
Here's something that hurts.
Here's something that that outrages you.
Here's an injustice that
you see in the world.
Police violence, incarceration, ecoside,
the draining of a wetland, whatever
it is, here's something that hurts
and then war of thinking takes that energy
that could go to healing and diverts it
onto something that only
fights the symptoms.
So I want to get serious
about healing this world,
participating in the
healing of this world.
So, foundation pieces, I did
that. Building blocks, components,
and then there's just the whole structure
and I'll just say one very short thing about that.
It is the story of the world
that
to quote myself, (audience laughing)
that our hearts know is possible.
That we invite people into.
It's a world where everybody has a place.
Where everybody is valued.
Where everybody can be welcomed and
known to have a gift that is essential
to make that world even richer.
Where nobody's left out.
And again,
as with Julio Diaz,
to speak compellingly of that world,
you have to have seen it.
The story we hold about the world is an
invitation for the world to enter that story too.
story too.
We have to have seen it.
And I would say probably everybody
in this room has seen it.
You have had a glimpse of
what the world could be.
That the world could be peaceful,
that the power elite, the perpetrators,
the military commanders, the
politicians, the executives,
that this isn't really working for them
either. And that there's a part of them
that is willing to make the courageous
choice to let go of something that was precious to them,
but that now maybe they're starting to
realize it's not so precious after all.
So,
here we are all gathered together,
all having caught a glimpse
or many glimpses in our lives
of a world that we know is possible
and we don't know how to get there.
The mind says it's not possible
because, what's the plan?
The mind is immersed in,
I've been calling it war thinking,
but it's deeper than war thinking.
It's forced based causality.
How are you going to make it happen?
That's a more subtle
variation on war thinking.
How are you going to make it happen?
How are you going to exert a force
on a mass? That's Newtonian physics?
That's part of the old story of
separation too. Well, we don't know.
It's not going to - we don't have
enough force and and information to act
precisely to make it happen. We're
going to have to trust something else.
We're going to have to trust that there
is an intelligence in the world greater than ourselves.
There is an organic tendency or will
toward organization and beauty and complexity
that is unfathomably mysterious.
So we don't know how it's going to happen,
but we don't have to fight
the world to make it happen.
Instead we start by listening.
What is my part?
How shall I be deployed?
Where am I to be and what is mine to do?
What calls to my care?
And from that place,
maybe we become able to speak that
world story, to speak that invitation,
or maybe we just carry it in ourselves
and act from it.
From our knowledge of it,
that in these gatherings we
remind each other is real
because you wouldn't be here
if you hadn't seen it too.
The very fact of this gathering
stirs my optimism.
Reminds me,
I'm not crazy.
You wouldn't be here, even if you'd come
with loads of skepticism and despair,
you're here.
You still have hope.
Life never dies.
Living things die.
But life itself --
always strives more life.
So I will end with this,
with this thank you for carrying that bit,
that glimpse
of a more beautiful world with you so
that we can weave a peace narrative
around it.
Yes.
Thank you so much. [audience clapping]
