WORLD PEACE: One Spirit ~ Universal Love ~ Manifesting in Many Bodies
This is the “project”: what we “envision”, how we project it, and get what we ask for in full conscience.
"I see no
poverty in the world of tomorrow
- no wars, no revolutions, no bloodshed.
And in that world, there will be a faith in God
greater and deeper than ever in the past."
- Mohandas Gandhi
Excerpt:
"Shortly
before he died, John Lennon was asked why he devoted so much of his time and
energy to peace. 'Isn't that a waste of time?' the reporter asked. Lennon
answered that he believed that Leonardo de Vinci help make flying possible
because he imagined it, discussed it, painted it and brought it into people's
consciousness.
'What a person projects
can eventually happen,' he
said. 'And therefore, I
always want to project peace. I want to project it in song, word, and action. I
want to put the possibility of peace into the public imagination. And I know, as
certain as I am standing here, that someday peace will be.'
-
Taken from "Dare
to Imagine" below
--------- article
follows:
Dare to Imagine
http://www.plough.com/articles/daretoimagine.html
by John Dear, S.J.
The story is told
that in the early 1980s a small group gathered in their church basement in East
Germany to ask a daring question: "What will Germany look like a thousand
years from now when the Berlin Wall finally falls?"
There was no question of the Wall coming down soon. Such a prospect was
unimaginable. Communism was here to stay. The grip of the Soviet empire was
permanent. The suicidal competition between the two nuclear superpowers seemed
preordained.
And yet, they asked the question. They allowed their imagination free reign.
What would a world without the Wall look like? And what must we do now to hasten
that great day a thousand years from now?
"Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I'm a dreamer,
but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will live
as one." .... John Lennon
I believe that asking such a question, letting our imaginations challenge us and
daring to dream of a new world unleashes a spirit of transformation that can
actually change history.
According to the story, the small group felt energized as they discussed their
dream. They decided to meet again a few weeks later. Soon word of the meetings
spread and more people began to meet in church basements to dream of a world
without the Wall. Over the next few years, a grassroots movement grew.
Ordinary people on both sides of the Wall pursued the vision of unity and
reconciliation. They met, organized, prayed and spoke out. Then, out of the
blue, Mikhail Gorbachev announced his new policy of perestroika. The Polish
Solidarity movement pushed the Soviets out and a new democracy was born. Events
moved quickly. Communism collapsed and the Soviet Union imploded.
The God of peace is hard at work trying to disarm the world. But God needs our
help. God needs every one of us to be part of God's global transformation for
peace and justice. God needs our grassroots movements of nonviolent resistance
to disarm the world.
The grassroots movement begun in East Berlin by a handful of faithful dreamers
made all the difference. In November 1989, tens of thousands of people marched
in East Berlin to demand the fall of the Wall. Every day, more people marched.
Soon, hundreds of thousands were marching. Then all of a sudden, on November
9th, the Wall fell down. It took the world by surprise. Yet the Berlin Wall
could not have come down peacefully without the grassroots visionaries who
dreamed, imagined, met, discussed and organized over the years.
Gorbachev needed a grassroots movement to make his vision bear fruit. In other
words, the Wall fell because ordinary people imagined a world without the Wall.
They held up the possibility of a world without the Wall and they acted as if
such a world was possible and inevitable.
New Abolitionists
Their daring vision reminds me of the abolitionists who imagined a world without
slavery. "Every human being is equal," they said. "Everyone
has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, regardless of race.
No human can be bought, owned or sold. Therefore, slavery must be abolished -
now!" They were dismissed as unpatriotic revolutionaries, unrealistic
idealists, and crazy lunatics. "Slavery has always existed," they
were told. "This is the way things have always been and always will be.
Some people are not human. Even St. Paul endorsed slavery! You cannot change the
course of history."
"No," they said. "The time of slavery is over. A new world without
slavery is coming." The great herald of the abolitionist movement,
William Lloyd Garrison, set the tone for the movement when he published his
newspaper, "The Liberator," in 1831 and declared to the world that
the age of slavery is over. His front page editorial in the first issue stirred
the nation. "I am in earnest. I will not equivocate. I will not excuse. I
will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard," he announced. With
the help of hundreds of committed activists, Garrison wrote and spoke out day
and night against slavery. He encouraged people to join the movement, smuggle
slaves into Northern freedom, disrupt the culture of slavery and demand equality
for all. These abolitionists were attacked, mobbed, threatened, jailed and even
killed. They practiced steadfast nonviolent civil disobedience against the laws
which legalized slavery. Their vision and determination paved the way for the
abolition of slavery.
Like the abolitionists who envisioned a world without slavery, we are new
abolitionists who envision a world without war, poverty, injustice and nuclear
weapons. We give our lives to that vision, creating movements for disarmament
and justice, trusting that one day, the vision will come true.
Reclaiming Our Imaginations
We have much to learn from these imaginative visionaries. Like them, we need to
reclaim our imagination. We have to begin to dream again of new possibilities.
We need to exercise our imaginations, and envision a new world, no matter how
crazy others think we are. In a world of war and nuclear weapons, that means
imagining a world without war or violence.
One of the casualties of our culture of war is the loss of our imagination. We
can no longer imagine a world without war or nuclear weapons or violence or
poverty. Few dream of a world of nonviolence. If we do, we are dismissed as naﶥ
or idealistic. Yet without the imagination for peace, the vision of peace, we
will never get out of the downward cycle of violence that is destroying us.
If we want to discover the blessings of peace, we have to renounce war and
dedicate ourselves to a new world without war. Every human being has to join
this global campaign for peace if we are to lead ourselves away from the
precipice of global catastrophe. We need to rediscover our shared humanity and
reclaim the higher principles of love, justice, compassion and equality. We need
to demand food, clothing, housing, education, health care, and dignity for every
child on the planet. We need to give our lives for a future of peace.
The Blindness of Violence
But if we want to envision such a world, we must recognize that we are blind,
that we can no longer see clearly. We can no longer see our way to peace. We
cannot see our way toward dismantling our arsenals, ceasing our bombings raids,
supporting the world's poorer nations, ending hunger and poverty, and pursuing
universal brother and sisterhood. Instead, we see only war and further wars. We
can imagine all kinds of weapons of mass destruction and ever greater invasions
and wars. We can dream up astonishing new weapons. We put our best minds, our
time, our funds, and our energies into this vision of war. In the process, we
blind ourselves to the vision of peace.
Violence blinds us. We think we see, but we have grown blind to our shared
humanity. We do not see one another as human beings, much less brothers and
sisters. Instead, we see non-humans, aliens, outsiders, competitors, objects of
class, race or nationality. When that happens, we label people as enemies, and
declare them as expendable.
If we want to see our way toward a new world without war, we need to recover our
sight. We need to meet together in church basements and small grassroots
communities to discuss the daring, provocative question, "What would a world
without war look like?" As we ask the question, we can begin to imagine such a
world. Then, we can discuss and enact ways to make that new world a reality.
In order to reclaim this vision, we need to teach each other that war is not
inevitable, that war is not our future, that nuclear destruction need not be our
destiny, that peace can come true for all people. We have to rekindle the desire
for the vision of peace. Once we desire it, we will pray for it, work for it,
and welcome it - and move our culture from blindness to vision, from numbness to
imagination, from war to peace.
Since our blind leaders are driving us to the brink of destruction, we have to
take the wheel, turn back, and lead one another away from the brink. We cannot
expect vision from the warmakers or their media spokespeople. Only peacemakers
can see the way forward toward a world of peace.
To be visionaries of peace we need to be contemplatives of nonviolence, people
who imagine the God of peace, who let God disarm our hearts, who allow the God
of peace to show us the way to peace. As visionaries and contemplatives of
peace, we can then become a prophetic people who not only denounce imperial
violence as ungodly, immoral, and evil, but announce God's way of nonviolence,
justice and peace.
The Vision of Nonviolence
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s most famous speech outlined his dream of a new world
of equality and justice. He upheld the vision of nonviolence. Five years later,
on the night before he was killed, he spoke of being on the mountaintop and
seeing the promised land. "For years, we have been talking about war and
peace," he said. "But now, no longer can we just talk about it. It
is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence; it's nonviolence or
nonexistence." With these last words, the great visionary pointed the
way forward to make his dream a reality.
Nonviolence employs a vision of a disarmed, reconciled humanity, the reign of
God in our midst, what King called "the beloved community," the
truth that all life is sacred, that we are all equal sisters and brothers, all
children of the God of peace, already reconciled, all one, already united. Once
we accept this vision of the heart, we can never hurt or kill another human
being, much less remain silent while our country wages war, maintains nuclear
weapons, executes people or allows millions to starve to death.
Active nonviolence is much more than a tactic or a strategy; it is a way of
life. We renounce violence and vow never to hurt anyone ever again. Nonviolence
demands active love and truth that seeks justice and peace for the whole human
race, resists systemic evil, and persistently reconciles with everyone. It
insists that there is no cause however noble for which we support the killing of
a single human being. Instead of killing others, we are willing to be killed in
the struggle for justice and peace. Instead of inflicting violence on others, we
accept and undergo suffering without even the desire to retaliate with further
violence as we pursue justice and peace for all people.
Nonviolence is a life force, Gandhi said, that when harnessed becomes contagious
and can disarm nations and change the world. It begins in our hearts, where we
renounce the violence inside us, then moves outward with active, contagious
truth and love toward our families, communities, nation and the world. As we
practice it personally in the face of violence, we also join grassroots
movements for justice and peace to organize nonviolence on the national and
international level for the disarmament of the world. When nonviolence is put
into action, it always works, as Gandhi demonstrated in India's revolution, as
King and the civil rights movement showed, as the People Power movement showed
in the Philippines, and as Archbishop Tutu and South Africa showed against
apartheid.
Next August 6th marks the 60th anniversary of our atomic vaporization of 130,000
people in Hiroshima. My friends and I are trying to imagine a world where this
horrific violence will never happen again. We are working through the global
grassroots disarmament movements to make our voice heard and welcome such a
world.
This vision of peace means we have to disarm Los Alamos, the birthplace of the
bomb, not far from where I live in New Mexico and transform New Mexico and the
entire nation from a land of nuclear violence to a land of nonviolence. I hope
and pray that all of us will pursue this vision of peace, and use this upcoming
anniversary as a moment to call the nation once again to disarmament.
Shortly before he died, John Lennon was asked why he devoted so much of his time
and energy to peace. "Isn't that a waste of time?" the reporter
asked. Lennon answered that he believed that Leonardo de Vinci help make flying
possible because he imagined it, discussed it, painted it and brought it into
people's consciousness. "What a person projects can eventually happen,"
he said. "And therefore, I always want to project peace. I want to project
it in song, word, and action. I want to put the possibility of peace into the
public imagination. And I know, as certain as I am standing here, that someday
peace will be."
If we dare imagine a new world without war and reclaim the possibility
of peace, as John Lennon believed, we will raise human consciousness and help
pave the way toward a new nonviolent world. Our mission, our duty, our vocation
is to reclaim that vision of peace, and pursue the abolition of war, violence
and nuclear weapons. All we have to do is open our eyes and take another step
forward on the road to peace.
###
John Dear is a Jesuit priest and the author / editor of twenty books, including
"Living Peace," "Disarming the Heart," "Jesus the Rebel," "Mohandas Gandhi,"
"The God of Peace," "Peace Behind Bars," and "The Questions of Jesus."
-------
Imagine (song)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagine_(song)
"Imagine" is a utopian song performed by John Lennon, which appears on his 1971
album Imagine. Although originally credited solely to Lennon, in recent years
Yoko Ono's contribution to the song has become more widely acknowledged. The
song was produced by Phil Spector. Imagine is widely considered as one of the
greatest songs of all time. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine voted "Imagine" the
third greatest song of all time. Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter said,
"In many countries around the world - my wife and I have visited about 125
countries - you hear John Lennon's song 'Imagine' used almost equally with
national anthems." - CLIP
"We look around us at the madness so prevalent in the world today, the hate and violence, the greed. Feeling overwhelmed, our egos erect walls to hide behind. But rather than offering security, these walls separate and fragment, creating fear and more insecurity. We see evil on all sides, not realizing that the way we see the world is a reflection of what we are inside. What is the answer? How can we break this vicious cycle which threatens to blow the world apart? Love is the way. Love is the only way to true peace! Love is unifying. Love opens our hearts and our souls, showing us the way to live in peace and harmony with our fellow human beings throughout the world. Love reveals the fact that in truth we are one. We are one being. Therefore, what we do to any member of the human race, we do to ourselves. The injunction to "Love thy neighbor as thyself" commands us to love everyone, without distinction of race, religion, etc. - without moral judgment. This tenet is central to all great religions. We do not have to agree with our neighbor, but we must love. Love is the Only Way."
- Raphael Egger <raphael@WeAreOne-Love.net> - Taken from http://weareone-love.net/
[Raphael
has created T-shirts with the word "Love" in 35 languages on it to
"promote the awareness around the world that we are truly one in spirit
manifesting in many bodies."]
~~~~~~~~~
THE “ALL-CONNECTED”
CONSCIENCE PRINCIPLE
Conceive
LOVE and Center
LOVE to Achieve
LOVE
at the heart of our individual
and collective
CONSCIENCE.
"Each time a person
stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others. . .
they send forth a ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million
different centers of energy and daring,
those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of
oppression and resistance."
-
Robert F. Kennedy
“I could not
be leading a religious life unless I identified myself with the whole of
mankind,
and that I could not do unless I took part in politics. The whole gamut of
man’s activities
today constitutes an indivisible (holy) whole. You cannot divide social,
economic, political
and purely religious work into watertight compartments.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
"Man
can harness the winds, the waves and the tides,
but when he can harness the
power of love,
then for the second time in the history of the world,
man will have discovered fire."
- Teihard de Chardin
~~~~~~~~~
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