Principled and Strategic Nonviolence Prof. Prem Anand Mishra

 

Gandhi's World View: Beliefs and Goals Dr. Michael W. Sonnleitner

Gandhi’s Worldview: Beliefs and Goals

Dr. Michael W.Sonnleitner

 In this session, we will be looking specifically at Gandhi's beliefs and goals. Now, let us turn our attention to beliefs specifically, Satya, Ahimsa, and Tapas.

If you come from a Christian background, this might sound familiar. Gandhi was heavily influenced by Christianity, and you can actually think of his core beliefs as a trinity—much like the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. For Gandhi, this trinity consists of Truth, Non-violence, and Voluntary Suffering. Fascinatingly, this triad also corresponds beautifully to the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu.

Let’s start with the first element: Satya, or Truth. As we touched upon the matter earlier, truth for Gandhi is both absolute and relative at the same time. It is a "both-and" reality. In Hindu philosophy, this absolute truth connects to cosmic order—what we might call Rita—rather than just a singular deity.

Relative truth, on the other hand, is best understood through the famous parable of the blind individuals and the elephant. We are all, in a sense, blind. We each touch a different part of the elephant—a leg, a trunk, a tail—and we think we understand the whole animal. But we don't. We only see our own small piece of relative truth.

This brings us to the Jain concept of Anekantavada, or the many-sidedness of truth. This principle was foundational for Gandhi. Because our individual vision is limited, we absolutely must communicate with the other "blind" people around us to build a better understanding of the whole elephant. To see the full picture, we have to learn to see through other people's eyes—through their cultures, their religions, and their unique traditions.

Later, we will see how this directly fuels Satyagraha, or non-violent resistance. Satyagraha is a journey where you constantly grow from truth to truth. It requires you to always listen to your opponent and actively learn from others. We must live, and we must learn.

You might ask, "Michael, what is the ultimate purpose of life? Why do I even exist?"

Well, the specific answer is for you to discover. But bottom line? When the dust settles, Gandhi would say you are here to learn who you are. Life is fundamentally a learning experience. Do not expect to possess the absolute truth at the beginning of your journey, and you probably won't possess all of it at the end of this lifetime either. Perhaps that is precisely why we return in another life—to continue the learning process.

Our primary duty in this life is simply to do our duty: to learn to be the best version of ourselves that we can possibly be. This is your individual Dharma.

For me, my vocation—my Dharma—is to be the best teacher I can possibly be. Some of you in this room might become fashion designers. If so, your Dharma is to be the best fashion designer you can possibly be. Others among you may have served, or are currently serving, as military soldiers. Your duty, then, is to be the best soldier you can possibly be.

Now, you might say, "Michael, you're starting to confuse me..." You might ask, "How can I be a soldier and still believe in this philosophy?"

Well, in this life, there are those who are naturally called to be protectors. In the Hindu tradition, we speak of this as a Kshatriya disposition—the warrior spirit. By the way, that is actually how I identify. I see myself as a soldier. As a younger man, I practiced violence. I was engaged in at least four major fistfights. The proof of it is right here: my nose was broken four times. Mind you, I lost every single one of those fights! It didn't work out very well for me.

But I was taught to fight. Eventually, I came to see Gandhi himself as a fighter—a Satyagrahi who used non-violence instead of physical force. That appealed to me greatly. My duty as a soldier now is as a teacher, seeking to fight the good fight and doing the best I can to make the world a better place. Our Svadharma—our individual, inherent duty—becomes our supreme duty.

Those of you from a Hindu background who are familiar with the Bhagavad Gita know the story of the warrior Arjuna, who is guided on the battlefield by Krishna as his charioteer. The typical, mainstream interpretation of the Gita is that Arjuna is advised to look past his emotions. He is told to overcome his sorrow at seeing his own family and friends on the opposing side of the battlefield. The message is: "You must do your duty, Arjuna. You must fight, and you must kill."

But Gandhi reads the Gita with far more sophistication. He sees that Arjuna's true challenge is to transcend his ego, his emotions, and his attachments. Eventually in the text, Krishna reveals ultimate reality to Arjuna in a sudden flash. In that cosmic vision, Arjuna realizes that we are all one.

Gandhi argues that our supreme duty is to recognize God in all of creation and in all human beings—whether they are your opponents on the battlefield, people off the battlefield entirely, or even the trees and the animals. Once you possess that deep, spiritual realization, you can do no violence. Gandhi is ultimately advising readers of the Gita not to be superficial soldiers who blindly carry out violence, but to be enlightened like Arjuna. Practice your supreme duty to bring non-violence and good to all of creation. That is a very different kind of soldier. It is a profoundly creative function, closely aligned with Brahma, the creator.

This brings us to Ahimsa, or Non-violence—the second element on our list of beliefs. Like truth, Ahimsa operates in both absolute and relative terms. It is a "both-and" reality. In this life, we are always operating as both violent and non-violent at the same time.

For Gandhi, perfect non-violence is something you may be able to achieve, but only at the exact point of death. It happens when you no longer rely on any form of violence to survive. If you are able to completely forgive the person who is killing you, and your soul leaves your body with an attitude of absolute love for all of creation, that is the moment of perfection. At that exact second, your individual drop of water merges back into the godhead. Perfect non-violence yields perfect liberation—Moksha—where you cease to be reincarnated and become one with God.

But again, for Gandhi, that ultimate state only occurs at the moment of death. Before that, while we are alive, we are a mixture of both.

Now, imagine a scale. On one end, you have perfect non-violence. On the absolute opposite end, you have perfect violence. How do you achieve perfect violence? Gandhi would tell you that it is a completely unworthy goal, but the way you get there is by being a coward. A total coward.

To achieve perfect violence, you must be so frozen in your fear of death and pain that you completely cease to function. I began to understand this deeper meaning when I read a book called The Informed Heart by Bruno Bettelheim, a Jewish psychiatrist who was interned at several concentration camps, including Auschwitz.

As a trained psychiatrist, Bettelheim observed human behaviour under extreme trauma. He saw that some prisoners became what he termed "zombies"—the walking dead. He wrote about how these individuals allowed their self-respect to be so utterly destroyed, and their fear to become so completely internalized, that they stopped eating and sleeping. They would walk around aimlessly until they literally dropped dead.

This text helped me understand exactly what Gandhi meant. Gandhi would say: "Never allow anyone to harm your self-respect." Your self-respect is your reverence for your own soul—the God within you. When you lose respect for that inner truth, you are no longer capable of learning. You have reached a state very close to perfect violence.

This understanding gives us Gandhi’s true continuum, stretching from perfect violence all the way to perfect non-violence. Most of us live in the long range in between, where we are simultaneously violent and non-violent. The challenge is to look at where you stand on that scale and consciously choose to move a little higher.

If you are trapped at the bottom, facing a choice between absolute cowardice and terrorism, Gandhi makes a statement that heavily confuses the binary Western mindset. He suggests that it is better to violent than to be a coward.

Now, a binary thinker might jump to the conclusion: "Gandhi is endorsing terrorism! He is encouraging the intentional killing of innocent non-combatants!" See, that's a binary thinking. Gandhi was saying if in your mind the choice is between cowardice and terrorism, choose terrorism. Now, if you are disposed to terrorism, Gandhi would say, "Hey, consider tactical non-violence." No, don't go that far just yet. Consider just being a regular soldier. Move from terrorism to being a regular soldier in the Indian army or the US military. They abide by much higher standards. US soldiers are told that it is wrong to kill non-combatants. They can be punished even for following orders to kill children and women. US soldiers have standards. They don’t always follow them, but the bottom line is that they are above terrorism. So, Gandhi would say if you are disposed to terrorism, then think about going one step higher and being a regular, principled, disciplined soldier. Once you are there, you have gone up the ladder.

Now, from that point, consider tactical non-violence. Read Gene Sharp. Look at strategic non-violence simply as a strategy; you don’t have to accept it in principle. The best practitioners of tactical non-violence are people who have self-discipline, are willing to suffer, hold firm to the truth as they see it, and are tough. They are willing to be out in exceptionally cold winter weather, like we had in Minnesota last January when regular citizens of Minnesota were out protesting against Donald Trump and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement federal officers who were arresting allegedly undocumented people in the streets. Regular people can use tactical non-violence, but you must be disciplined, and you must be committed to strategic non-violence.

Once you have that commitment, you have climbed from coward to terrorist, to regular soldier, to tactical non-violence. Now, consider principled non-violence: beat your sword into ploughshares and your spear into pruning hooks. If there are enough of you, nation will not rise up against nation, nor will they make war anymore. That is from the Old Testament of the Bible, from Isaiah.

Gandhi sees stages of non-violence. He sees levels of non-violence. He never claims to be a perfectly non-violent person himself because perfection is an ideal, and for Gandhi, ideals really cannot be achieved in this world. They are still vitally important to guide us; they are our moral compass. We do the best we can to achieve our ideals.

But again, for Gandhi, being a perfectly non-violent person is achievable only at the point of death. That might not sound like good news to you. On the other hand, Gandhi is not here to give you good news; he is here to give you a way to bring about a better world.

So, you might ask, "Well, if Jesus was so close to perfectly non-violent, why didn't Jesus, or Buddha, or even Muhammad—why didn't they just give us peace? Why didn't they very simply use their soul-force power to make life heaven on earth?"

 And Gandhi's response is because the purpose of Jesus and most other saints is not to give us salvation. It is to show us the way to salvation. It is for each of us individually to learn for ourselves why we are living on this planet.

When Jesus says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father but through me," Gandhi interprets it to mean that no one can come but through truth. That's kind of what he means. Jesus wanted to become the way; he wanted to become the truth. Even though he might not have had absolute truth in his life, he was working towards it. And he wanted to show us the way of the cross, which is the way of suffering love.

Now, let us get to Tapas. It is voluntary suffering, and it is always also on a continuum. There is voluntary and involuntary suffering. There is voluntary poverty, and there is involuntary poverty. Voluntary self-sacrifice for Gandhi is redemptive. It is what Christians would call the way of the cross. Involuntary poverty and suffering, however, are problematic. It is distracting. It is very difficult to focus on spiritual development if your stomach is hungry and you are shivering in the cold.

For Gandhi, we must be willing to sacrifice ourselves so that others may more effectively live and learn and become more enlightened. I am moving a little fast, but Tapas can be seen as something positively good. Most Western thinkers—and I would include Martin Luther King Jr., who was also largely a very binary thinker because it was in his tradition—try to minimize suffering tactically and otherwise. They want to avoid suffering. As we will see later, they will try to have even the military protect a protest demonstration so that opponents, like the Ku Klux Klan or other racist elements, may be restrained from harming us.

Gandhi himself did not look at his strategy that way. As we will see, voluntary suffering is the essential component of love. You might ask, "What? What is he? A masochistic, crazy person?" No. I would say Gandhi is actually very practical here.

Imagine two groups of people in American folklore. They could be called the Hatfields and the McCoys—two families that had a bitter feud. The Hatfields would kill a member of the McCoys. The McCoys would retaliate by killing a Hatfield. Kill a McCoy, kill a Hatfield, kill a McCoy. This dynamic can relate to all sorts of other contexts: communal strife in India, the India-Pakistan conflicts, or the struggles between Palestinians and Zionists.

But for Gandhi, here is the practical, simple reality: if we are truly to practice Ahimsa, or non-violence, towards others, we must be willing to love those who do not love us. And that requires Tapas. It is like the love of a mother for her child—even if the child is abusive, she is a family member who continues caring for them.

It's practical. To use the example of the Hatfields and McCoys again: a Hatfield hits a McCoy. A McCoy hits a Hatfield. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The karmic cycle continues until someone has very red cheeks, maybe a traumatic brain injury, or maybe even death. And then the cycle goes on and on and on. We reap what we sow.

For Gandhi, non-violence—Ahimsa—is an essential part of Tapas because if you love those who don't love you, you must be willing to suffer their violence. It is the only way to end the cycles of violence and hatred in the world. It is the only way. If we reap what we sow, we must sow something different to stop the endless cycles of violence. Or as Buddha would say, "Hatred cannot destroy hatred; only love can destroy hatred."

Gandhi didn't only believe this; he believed that it was part of absolute truth. It was the law of karma put into practice in this world. If we reap what we sow, we must sow love. If we sow love for those who do not love us, we must be willing to voluntarily suffer the consequences. This is not ideological for Gandhi. It is simply practical. It is pure pragmatism. It is reality.

Now, let's address goals in our remaining time. This is near-impossible, but it's okay.

Moksha is self-realization. It is a religious goal to be liberated from the pain of this world and allow one's soul to merge into the godhead. You become free from the cycles of reincarnation, or Samsara. It involves enlightenment—having learned, perhaps at the point of death, the full realization of how natural and moral laws interact, much like Krishna giving Arjuna enlightenment toward the end of the Bhagavad Gita. For Gandhi, Moksha involves servant leadership—helping others to better understand Rta, Ram, or Sat, which are parts of ultimate reality. You are accessing soul force as you practice Moksha and try to move towards the godhead.

I am going to give you a story from the Christian Old Testament: Daniel in the Lion's Den. Some of you may have heard it, but basically, Daniel was a Jewish person who would not abandon his faith in God, which was truth for him. The king of Babylon was influenced by a woman—there is always a woman causing a problem in these stories—and the ruler required Daniel to renounce his God. Daniel refused. The ruler threw Daniel into a den of hungry lions, a very horrible form of death. Daniel prayed to God in the story, and the presence of God came into the midst of Daniel and the lions. Consequently, the lions would not attack him. Daniel emerged from the den of lions unharmed. It was a miracle.

From Gandhi's point of view, this is not miraculous. If we surrender to the Atman—the soul, the life force within us—and we are willing in our minds to sacrifice our bodies for the sake of the Atman to understand and realize truth, we can appeal to the Atman, the soul, the life force in any other person or any other creature, including a lion. From a Gandhian point of view, Daniel surrendered to God. God's light shone in his presence, and the lions would no longer attack Daniel. Instead, they would chew on their own paws because the barrier between Daniel and the lions had been broken. They had realized that they were one together.

This is soul force. It is non-physical. It is not strategic. It is not a matter of tactics. For Gandhi, soul force is real. And yes, most relatively weak human beings who are not spiritually developed are going to be eaten by the lions. But if you are a sufficiently developed Satyagrahi, if you are sufficiently surrendered to the God within you, what might appear to be miraculous can still happen because nothing is impossible for God. Gandhi would say that over and over: nothing is impossible for God. When you surrender to the God within you, soul force may become manifest in you to a matter of degree. And again, it might not look exactly like Daniel, but you may still touch the heart of your opponent, even if they are not a lion.

For Gandhi, this is the highest goal of principled non-violence. And by the way, it corresponds to Maslow's hierarchy of needs because Moksha, or self-realization, is very similar to Maslow's self-actualization. It is a religious counterpart to the secular Maslow hierarchy. I hope some of you will look at that carefully and find some insight in it.

Swadeshi is self-reliance. It is Gandhi's primary economic goal, and it involves levels of the individual, family, community, nation, and even worldwide. The spinning wheel serves as a symbol here because he believes that we should have a decentralized economic system. This perspective would later inspire the book Small Is Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher, a British thinker. Gandhi believed in economic empowerment, the decentralization of power, and technology appropriate to what you want to accomplish. Let's briefly look at this a little further.

First, as a Hindu person of culture, Gandhi always thinks in a "both-and" manner, but he also looks at things in a hierarchical way, from highest to lowest: perfect non-violence to perfect violence, the highest level of Swadeshi to the lowest level of Swadeshi. Swadeshi can also be conceptualized as concentric circles. This diagram I have here is a very poor piece of art, but it relates to the concept.

You can see that at the centre of all the circles is the self—your individual person, which ultimately is God for Gandhi, your Atman. So, you should seek to surrender to yourself, your soul, and to be self-reliant as an individual person to the extent that you can. The spinning wheel allows you to cultivate that mentality by spinning your own thread from cotton. It is a mental exercise which will then be used to make your own clothing. It is almost the ultimate symbol of self-reliance, which is Swadeshi.

Now again, the individual at the centre does their best, but you know I cannot do everything. I am not an engineer, I am not a medical doctor, and I cannot repair shoes very well. There are all sorts of functions that are not my Dharma. And so Gandhi would say then the next level is your family. Contribute to your family, and your family should be as self-reliant as possible, having different members fulfilling different functions. And by the way, you as a person should be willing to sacrifice and die if necessary for the sake of your family.

Now, another level would be your village, and this is Gandhi's image that will merge into Swaraj of village self-reliance. Imagine 400,000 or more independent villages where all the basic necessities of life are accomplished and produced locally. Now, you can survive. Typhoons may happen; earthquakes may happen; there are still issues way beyond your control. But in normal times, you should be able to produce and take care of your own village. And by the way, your family should be willing to sacrifice and die if necessary for the sake of the village, in the same way as you as a person should be willing to sacrifice and die if necessary for the sake of your family.

Now, go broader. Beyond the village, there is the region; there is the nation. So if, in fact, a horrible typhoon strikes Kolkata and there are tens of thousands of people dead and starvation happening, then for Gandhi our duty is for every region, every village, and every family to sacrifice and share what they can to help the people of Bengal, of Kolkata. Help them as they would help us. It is the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It operationalizes a decentralized vision to a much larger context.

And similarly, a nation based upon this sort of decentralized power is truly nationalistic according to Gandhi if they are willing to help Mexico in their time of need when Mexico has an earthquake, or the Philippines when they have a volcanic eruption and there is mass harm done. India, the US, tiny little Costa Rica—all should do what they can according to Swadeshi to help Mexico and the Philippines. You understand?

So ultimately, for Gandhi, being nationalistic is, even to the extreme, being willing to die for the sake that the world may live. Even as a person must be willing to die for their family, their family for their village, their village for their province, their province for their nation, the nation must be willing to die if necessary for the sake of the world. This is an exceptionally different kind of Swadeshi, isn't it? Where self-reliance is taken to an extreme level.

There is a similar logic, and you can see it, for Swaraj, which is the political goal of self-rule. There is Hind Swaraj—the name of Gandhi's book from 1909 on Home Rule—which is about creating independence for the country against British colonialism. But beyond Hind Swaraj, there is village rule: participatory democracy at the level of the 400,000 villages. There is also individual rule, where you have individuals within each village taking personal responsibility beyond Hind Swaraj at the highest level.

If every country on Earth—all 197 countries—achieves real home rule and self-reliance within their own country and is willing to sacrifice the necessary help to others throughout the world using Swadeshi, then the whole world can move towards the perfect ideal, which is not possible to fully achieve. But for Gandhi, that ideal is Ram Rajya—the kingdom of God.

Gandhi said Ram Rajya. But he did not express that in the sense of Hindutva, as Ram being the supreme ruler as an entity. He meant it generically as God. Gandhi's goal was not simply independence for India. Do you understand? His entire life and worldview had as an ultimate, perhaps unachievable goal, the kingdom of God. He wanted to achieve, in matters of degree, the kingdom of God on earth.

We have done the basics of assumptions, beliefs, and goals. We need some time to process a little in small groups here. I will leave it to you. But if you want to focus simply on just one issue, perhaps you can look upon this question: what do you think the kingdom of God would be for you ultimately? How would you like the world to be organized? How would you like the world to be?

And once you have that, think about how might we work towards achieving it? How might I individually work towards achieving that ultimate goal of world citizenship—a world at peace with itself, a positive peace with justice? What would the kingdom of God be for you?

Group Feedback and Q&A

Moderator: Welcome back, all of you. We exactly have eleven minutes left. It is better to briefly share the discussions from your groups so that we can have some time to discuss, and so that the professor can share his thoughts on that later. Okay, group number one.

Group One: In our group discussion, when we were talking about the Kingdom of God, one of the fellows said that freedom with responsibilities could be seen as something that is within the Kingdom of God. In that space, there is justice—even justice that is inclusive of all people, not just the selective best ones, but everybody. Somewhere that also means it doesn't support violence, and it is a place where humility comes before pride. Another fellow also mentioned that understanding what others are going through brings in peace, and that can also be one of the features of the Kingdom of God. The ways to achieve it would be to get involved with the world like a family, and to forgive—even if there have been instances of violence, to forgive and forget, and then build a new life every day so that we learn from a new life. Yes, we must have faith in each other so that we can make the world a better place. We cannot erase all of the past wrongs; we must move forward and be peaceful about it. That was the discussion we had in my group.

Group Two: I will give you a brief summary of what we discussed. The Kingdom of God was our primary concern. We noted that it starts at the individual level, where we must be ready to suffer. That is the initial first step that we can and should take. If we dream of it, the Kingdom of God itself is a perfect idea. As for perfection, we can only pursue it; it is not very easy to achieve, but we can pursue perfection only through these kinds of steps that we take. We also spoke about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which was very well connected by the professor, showing how Maslow's concepts can be connected at an individual level to form a secular idea of how to reach that level of maturity at a socio-political level. Additionally, we spoke about what the professor told us about how it is better to be a disciplined soldier than to be a coward. We concluded by discussing that everything we think of starts with breaking the loop of the cycle of violence. We can only talk about this when we are ready to break the cycle of violence; only then are we well-deserving to talk about the Kingdom of God. This is what group number two discussed.

Group Three: We were concerned about justice, giving to each their due, basic needs, and all of the rest that are fundamental to Maslow. That would be part of justice and the Kingdom of God. Respect for life and animals was brought up and emphasized as being just as important as human beings, and one of our members said that it's important to think of the environment as a whole and have respect for the environment. I raised the issue that all of this would need to exist within a decentralized system according to Gandhi, and I agree with the Kingdom of God being very decentralized, with individual people empowered, and families, nations, and others all being self-reliant and self-contained within themselves.

Group Four: I am from group four, where our initial discussion focused on dharma, moral duty, and ethical laws which belong to the Kingdom of God. These present us with a supreme sphere where you can see a peaceful world. Another point was making a comparison between our world and the Kingdom of God. As we can see, in our world, we can find inequality, violence, disturbance, and hunger; but in the Kingdom of God, we expect that all inequality will vanish, and the society or world will be equal, where everyone will get a peaceful and required life. Then, we focused on Swadeshi; if we start to do good things in our society, our village, and our religion, then that good work will return to us in other ways. If we see everything through the lens of love, we see the vision of God, and that might be nearer to the Kingdom of God. Lastly, the Kingdom of God is a place near to the path of non-violence.

Group Five: In group number five, we spoke about the concept of Ram Rajya. It is a place where whatever religion I want to practice, I am free to practice it, and everybody should love each other—meaning everybody loving one another. We spoke about gender equality, and then Swadeshi and peace, meaning a war-free society. Then, we spoke about the ability to live on one's own values, meaning everybody should live according to his or her own values. Then, we spoke about giving a fair opportunity to everyone, which is also Ram Rajya. I also spoke about how Ram Rajya is based on truth, non-violence, equality, justice, and peace. Swadeshi was also discussed from the point of view of the wars which are going on, like for oil. We depend so much on oil and a lot of things are happening in the world, wars are happening. So if we have the Ram Rajya, the Kingdom of God, we will produce our own things and we will not depend on others. So, that economic independence is very much necessary as per Swaraj.

Moderator: Thank you all. And another fellow has raised their hand. Let us listen.

Question: The Yoga Sutras say that to achieve this, we have to have the mindset of Maitri, Mudita, Karuna, and Upeksha. Maitri means friendship; we have to make friends with good people with good behaviour and all that. Then Mudita means being happy looking at happy people; if people have money and they are enjoying it and all that, we should not actually look down upon them, rather we should be happy that they are happy—that is Mudita. And then Karuna; those who are suffering, we must have pity on them, take pity on them, and as far as possible help them to come out of their grief. And then finally, Upeksha. Upeksha means ignoring evil. But I have heard that even Chanakya has said don't fight evil. Even Christ has said don't fight evil. So I was just wondering, if we should not fight evil, then should we protest about evil or should we not protest? I think the professor will be able to elaborate on this point. Thank you.

Answer: Well, we're out of time, but I think it is very dualistic to think in terms of "shall we fight or not fight"—either/or. It's very dualistic, and again, Gandhi is not looking at the world mostly that way. So, I think it's important to consider that from his point of view, we're always both violent and non-violent, and fighting may be more non-violent or violent depending upon how we fight. We need to have fighters who are willing to be more and more non-violent—fighters for justice, fighters to reduce suffering, fighters for liberation. Becoming more and more non-violent is the key issue.

 

Gandhi's World View: Assumptions Dr. Michael W. Sonnleitner

  

Gandhi’s World View: Assumptions

  Dr. Michael  W.Sonnleitner

Welcome to everyone. Today we are focusing on Gandhi's worldview—particularly the foundations of that worldview, which would be his assumptions. To understand many of Gandhi's concepts, though, I believe we need to see how they are part of a very powerful worldview. They are interrelated with one another. Oftentimes, we speak about concepts like karma, satyagraha, moksha, and ahimsa individually, but we don't see them as interrelated. Because I am a visual person—not just an auditory person—I don't want to just talk, talk, talk, talk. I want to also visualize, show, and demonstrate, and this is what I will begin to do today.

It is helpful for me to understand Gandhi by having an analytical framework. That may be partly due to my Western-educated background, but let me share this framework with you so that you can see its strengths and its weaknesses, and then we can apply it to Gandhi. I gained this framework from one of my professors at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. At that time, it was one of the top ten ranked political science graduate programs in the US, and one of the top five ranked South Asian studies programs in the US.

Edwin Fogelman knew little about South Asia, but he was a specialist in ideologies and idea systems. So, I did not create this framework; I'm crediting my professor, Edwin Fogelman. He provided a framework in which any idea system or worldview could be seen and literally visualized.

There we go. Four levels: assumptions, beliefs, goals, and strategies. And we could, of course, make them eight or ten, but this is complicated enough. He defined a political philosophy as a presentation of assumptions and beliefs; a political theory as assumptions, beliefs, and goals; and an idea system—a complete worldview or ideology—as assumptions, beliefs, goals, and strategies. I found this analytically very helpful.

The assumption level of any worldview or ideology, including Gandhi's, is not proven. It consists of elements that are assumed to be true. Now, we won't get too silly with this, but you look at me and you see Michael Sonnleitner. But maybe I am a spider dreaming that I am a human being. Can I prove that I am not a spider dreaming that I'm a human being? I can't prove that. I assume that what I am touching now is real and that I am not dreaming.

We all have fundamental assumptions that cannot be proven, and these may include, for example, that the Bible is the word of God. Okay, that is an assumption, and that is fine. I have some difficulties with it, but I cannot disprove it, you understand? If that is part of my assumption level, there will be consequences later in my beliefs, goals, and strategies. So, I won't beat that horse too far—we don't want to kill the horse—but I want you to understand that assumptions are foundational.

If you want to disagree with any person, including me, you can say, "Michael, I disagree with this basic assumption." Or to Gandhi, "Gandhi, I don't fully accept this basic assumption." You don't prove it, and Gandhi would say, "You're right. I don't prove it. I am Gandhi, and not a spider dreaming that I'm a human being." We all have basic assumptions. Okay?

But it is important to understand this because the power of, let's say, an Adolf Hitler is very strong if you grant him his basic assumptions. We won't get into Nazism today, but Nazism is an ideology that is very cohesive and very powerful if you grant the assumptions.

I am hoping that I may encourage you all to reflect upon your own basic assumptions in relation to Gandhi, and come to have a foundational idea of whether you more agree or disagree with him. That will impact your attitude and your response to everything else that he says—from Satyagraha to Sarvodaya to Ahimsa to everything.

Is Ahimsa an assumption rather than a belief? We can debate that. But I'm going to suggest that the beliefs—Satya, Ahimsa, Tapas—the goals—Moksha, Swadeshi, Swaraj—and the basic strategies—Brahmacharya, Sarvodaya, Satyagraha—allow us to cover almost all of Gandhi's basic concepts and begin to see their interrelationships.

In the first column, we have Rita, Satya, Moksha, and Brahmacharya. These are all labelled number one, which represents the philosophical or religious category.

Number two includes the Golden Rule, Ahimsa, Swadeshi, and Sarvodaya. I see those as primarily economic—not exclusively, but that is their primary category.

And then number three is political: the Law of Karma, Tapas (which is voluntary suffering), Swaraj, and Satyagraha.

So, if ever I personally am giving a lecture on Gandhi's political views, while I may refer to some of the other concepts, I will focus on the Law of Karma (cause and effect, you shall reap what you sow), Tapas (voluntary suffering), Swaraj (self-rule), and Satyagraha (which is soul force, truth force, or holding firm to the truth as you see it). Those four concepts make for a cohesive way of looking at his political views.

Of course, his political views are not separate from his economic views, or from his philosophical and religious views. So, it is helpful for us to look at these twelve different concepts across different levels as interrelated. All right, that is enough perhaps for that.

But I think you will find that by utilizing Edwin Fogelman's categorizations—and maybe improving upon them yourselves—you can then compare Gandhi's worldview with that of John Locke's traditional liberalism, Karl Marx’s Marxism, Edmund Burke’s Organic Conservatism, Eugene Debs’s Democratic Socialism, Adolf Hitler's Nazism, Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda Islam, Martin Luther King Jr’s  Militant Nonviolence,  Mark Satin’s green ideology  and many others. You can compare Gandhi in a sophisticated way with any other political thinker who holds a worldview. I find this tool to be extremely empowering.

Someone like Adolf Hitler was not a crazy person. If you grant him his assumptions, his beliefs, goals, and strategies become very—sadly—powerful. As you would see when comparing Hitler with Gandhi, they have radically different assumptions, which lead to radically different beliefs, goals, and strategies. They all might be blind people touching the elephant in different ways, but I do believe that Gandhi had a better, clearer vision of the elephant than Hitler. We should listen to those who disagree with us and learn from them, and yet, we can still make choices. Truth is not entirely relative. The elephant does exist. Truth does exist. And as we will now see for Gandhi, Rita does exist.

Let us go ahead and go to the beliefs. Now, when it comes to assumptions, Rita—or Rta, which might be written differently in translating from Sanskrit to English—is all that is unchanging, as we'll see later. It is related to absolute truth. It is related to seeking Moksha, which is understanding absolute truth. It is related to Brahmacharya, the yogic discipline associated with seeking Moksha. It is religious and philosophical, but it is essential for Gandhi. You can talk about tactical nonviolence all you want, but you will not understand Gandhi unless you understand his assumptions. And most people, like Gene Sharp, don't really bother to analyze Gandhi's assumptions.

Now, looking at Rita as all that is unchanging, it is the sum total of the natural and moral laws of the universe. Natural laws include things like inertia and gravity. Moral laws include what Gandhi would call the law of love, for example. For Gandhi, natural laws, which are more empirical, and moral laws, which are not, are interconnected. If you violate a moral law like the law of love, there will be consequences, and they will manifest in nature.

Empirically, if you violate the law of love, you will lay the foundation for inequality and war. If you violate the law of love and disrespect the environment, this can lead to global warming, ice caps melting, sea levels rising, and entire islands disappearing. In other words, we can cause natural calamities by violating moral laws. This is Gandhi's way of looking at this foundational concept.

The Maya is often misunderstood. Maya is illusion—the idea that everything in this world is an illusion. Well, that is kind of true and not true at the same time. Obviously, if I knock on my head, I feel it. It's not an illusion. And yet, it is, because this head, this body, will turn to dust sooner or later. In my case, sooner, because I'm 77 years old and it's not likely to last too much longer. And so, it will cease to be.

My body, my mind, and my senses all bring in data that is involved in change. Ocean levels rise and fall. All of these things change. The seasons change the appearance of a tree. And yet, that doesn't make the tree unreal. It's not an illusion. It is, in fact, real, but it is a changing reality.

Gandhi wants to focus more on unchanging reality: gravity (scientifically verifiable), inertia, \(E=mc^2\)—laws that we can discover, including moral laws which may not be empirically verifiable yet.

The life force is part of Rita. For Gandhi, Paramatman—the supreme soul—is the ocean, and we are just individual drops of water within it. Your soul, the Atman within you, is that which is unchanging in your nature. Your emotions change, your mind changes, your body dies, but your soul, for Gandhi, is unchanging. It has no sex, no gender. It is not male or female. It does not grow young or old; it is that which is unchanging.

It is the life force that embodies everything. The soul or life force within you is the same as in the tree, is the same as in the algae in the ocean, and is the same as in Adolf Hitler. And you're beginning to see, if you understand this, why Gandhi has no 'enemy' concept. Because ultimately, Adolf Hitler has God within him also. The same Atman that is within myself is myself. And so ultimately, Hitler and I cannot be enemies because we are of the same life force—just with a different body, different emotions, and certainly a very different mindset.

So, understand that for Gandhi, human nature ultimately is your soul. It is unchanging. It cannot be harmed. If you are able to mentally focus upon that—that God is within you, that God is throughout all of creation, that you are God and not God at the same time, that you are a little drop of water but also the ocean in microcosm—you will begin to understand Gandhi's view of human nature and its relevance to the rest of his worldview.

Now, we often hear of Gandhi as being an Advaita Vedantin—a monistic, theological Hindu who sees everything as one. The basic image being a mountain with many, many paths up the side. They all arrive at the same summit at the top of the mountain. So ultimately, it makes no difference whether you're a Hindu, Muslim, Christian, or Jew, or whether you're an atheist following Karl Marx, or an agnostic like the British thinker Bertrand Russell. It makes no difference. There are many paths to truth up the mountain. And at the top, it is Gandhi's view that ultimately, we are one. We will all come to see the same insights, the same truth at the top of the mountain. So, there's really no need to evangelize or to convert you to anything. I don't need to go door-to-door and try to make you a good Christian, a good Jehovah's Witness, or a good whatever it might be.Be the goodness within your own tradition, and we will see one another at the top of the mountain. That is Gandhi's view of the unchanging nature of the mountaintop.

And yet, there is data showing that we are separate from others. There are differences between religions and different people; there is a dualism. So, there is a monism and a dualism. There is an idealism and a materialism. For Gandhi, we always come back to this 'both/and' perspective: we are both one with God and not one with God at the same time. Ideas are ultimately real, but material reality is also real. The idea of the chair and the chair itself are both real—both the idea and the material reality.

So, I would suggest that Gandhi is both monistic and dualistic at the same time. That can, of course, stimulate some good academic research on anyone's part, and you can have fun debating those questions. But that is how I see Gandhi, and you are welcome to disagree with me.

Let us go on to the Golden Rule and spend a little bit of time with that. Well, the Golden Rule is simple: you do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Q.E.D.—mathematically done. I don't prove it; I assume it.

Well, it is, of course, a little more complicated than that.  Now we see  the slide relating to the different formulations of the Golden Rule, and then we will come back to this.

Well, you can look at this as I am looking at it on my own screen now, and you can see that virtually every religious tradition in the world has a form of 'do unto others.' We don't need to go through each of them, but you can see Hinduism: 'Do not do to others what would cause pain if done to you.' Fair enough. Buddhism: 'Treat others in ways that you yourself would not find hurtful.' And you can go around to Islam: 'Not one of you truly believes until you wish for others what you wish for yourself.' And, of course, Christianity: 'In everything, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, for this is the law and the prophets.'

You can meditate upon these different traditions. Perhaps a particular rendition from Jainism or Zoroastrianism may not be fully to your liking. Again, it was a 'blind person' touching the elephant who created this, but they were doing their best.

Fundamentally, if we go back to the original presentation ,we can see that the Golden Rule can be approached through both positive and negative formulations.

The typical example of a positive formulation is found in Christianity: you do to others as you would have them do. You don't do to others before they do to you. You don't do to them because they do to you. You don't do to them in retaliation for what they have done. It is a unilateral positive: you do to others as you would have them do. Gandhi was heavily influenced by this positive formulation.

The negative formulations—'do not do'—sometimes leave the door open for an 'eye for an eye' mentality. People think, 'If someone harms me, I can harm them back as they have harmed me; I am doing to them as they have done to me.' That kind of interpretation puts a foot in the door for a wide-open descent into conflict and violence.

And yet, there is truth to be navigated in both the positive and negative formulations, isn't there? We struggle with this in life. To retaliate or not to retaliate is often the question. It might have been raised by Shakespeare, but it is raised in our lives on a daily basis. If someone screams at me, my first impulse may be to scream back. Okay, but what is the consequence of that? It is often an escalation where people are screaming and screaming, and pretty soon you can't even hear yourself. So, I suggest you consider both positive and negative formulations, and I, like Gandhi, tend to emphasize the positive. That can be your choice or not.

For Gandhi, the Golden Rule is also the categorical imperative. That comes from Immanuel Kant, the German thinker: you should so live as you would have everyone else live. Live by example, always. Well, that's impossible; you're not a perfect person. Well, do your best, because otherwise, you're a hypocrite—you criticize other people for your own weaknesses. Live as you would have everyone live. Consume as you would have everyone consume.

This directly relates to Gandhi and the environment. If I should live using only my fair share of the world's resources, that has massive consequences. In the green movement, there's the slogan: 'Live simply so that others may simply live.' With over 8 billion people on the face of the planet, there is enough for us all to live comfortably. However, if you choose to be among the 5% of the world's population—which is the United States—and consume 40% of what the world produces, that will create extreme conflict, starvation, and war. It's a direct consequence.

It will also create global warming. As you rape the planet of trees, you destroy one of the major vacuum cleaners for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere, creating a blanket around the globe that produces a greenhouse effect. We now know that worldwide global warming—manifesting at different temperatures and levels from the equator to the poles—is heavily influenced by the human creation of carbon dioxide as well as sulphur dioxide, methane, and other major greenhouse gases. If we are not living as we would have the world live—if we are over-consuming and raping the planet, if we are destroying the forests—these matters of physicality that are empirically verifiable are violations of the law of love and the Golden Rule, and they will have consequences. I'm trying to help you see that Gandhi is an interrelated, integrated thinker, even on the assumption level.

Now, this also relates to trusteeship, which is a concept worthy of an hour-long lecture or more by itself. Gandhi ultimately would say we are soul; we belong to God. In a sense, we are God. Self-defense is the defense of the life force within us being respected, which means respecting life throughout the entire planet and in every human being. If we possess more than our fair share of the world's resources, we create massive starvation, conflict, and other problems. Let us be trustees of that which we possess.

Suppose I'm a billionaire. No, let's say I'm Elon Musk—I'm a trillionaire. How far up can we go before we collapse of our own weight? Gandhi would say, 'Whatever you possess, Michael—this pen, this computer, all of these trinkets that you have lit up by your lamp preserving memories of your past—all that you possess is not owned by you.' In fact, your own body is not owned by you. Gandhi doesn't have a concept of private property. Everything belongs to God. Everything.

Whatever you have in your possession for use—this body until it dies, your trillion dollars, Mr. Musk, until you die and cannot take it with you—whatever you possess should be used for the common good. All of it should be used for the common good. You take for your personal use only that which you need. You do not satisfy your greed. You share whatever you have certainly beyond the basic surplus that you need to eat and so on. You share it with your children—oh, I just saw your beautiful little child on the screen there. You share it with your family. Think of the entire world as your family. You share it.

If a typhoon hits Bangladesh and people are suffering, you share what you can to help the Bangladeshis. If you have a situation in Gaza, which is genocidal, being carried out by another ideological system—which we might discuss later as Zionism—you must fight it, resist it, and help those individuals protect themselves from genocide. Whether harm comes through genocide, which is the ridiculous premeditated killing of an entire group or culture by another, or whether it comes through starvation because I am consuming 40% of the world's supplies, it comes to the same thing. We are harming others because we are not being trustees of our possessions.

We need to use our own bodies for constructive work as well as for resistance, as circumstances may require, and be willing to die in this body for the sake of life, so that others may live. And by the way, this is not a great sacrifice. Sooner or later, this body is going to die anyway. So, if it is going to happen sooner or later, it may as well be for a purpose. Martin Luther King Jr. lived to age 38, less than half of Gandhi's age, and yet he lived his life well. He was willing to die for what he believed. He did die in the body, and yet his spirit lives on. That is karma.

Now, let us get to karma. Karma: you shall reap what you sow. Well, yes, you can think of it in that sort of simple way, but Gandhi did not. Who are you? What are we? We are all inextricably linked. So let us think of this Law of Karma on four distinct levels.

The first level is the individual level: I shall reap what I sow. If I work hard, I should get rich. Well, there's something wrong here because I'm not rich! The Law of Karma must not be right, then. But that's not the way it works, because we are interrelated with everyone else and with all of creation.

Well, at least I'll be saved; I'll go to heaven, won't I? When you die, Gandhi would say your soul will live on, and it will come into the presence of an all-encompassing divine light, which will ask you how well you have lived. God does not punish you; you may punish yourself as you reflect upon how you have lived. So, heaven or hell may actually be more of a state of consciousness when coming into the presence of an all-encompassing, loving Creator. The life force that keeps us all animate asks us, 'Have you lived well?' That might be an awfully hard question. I'm working my best to try to be fairly positive in my response.

So yes, we reap what we sow individually, but we also reap what we sow socially. If we treat others as we would not want to be treated—if we treat our employees like dirt, don't allow them to unionize, and exploit them—we see the social consequences. I can give so many examples. Walmart in the United States exploits their employees and opposes their unionization. As a result, the owners of Walmart, the Walton family, are multi-multibillionaires. They provide cheap goods for poor people to buy, but they are helping to keep those people poor by not paying them well as employees. So, socially, we reap what we sow. And with Walmart, I could say the same potentially of Reliance Industries in India, or other corporations which are becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. By centralizing power, they may very well destroy local businesses where they happen to be operating. That is typical of Walmart in the United States and most other huge corporations. It is also true of Amazon Corporation, which too many people today rely on far too much. So think about that—the social consequences of how you spend money, how you invest, and how you buy and sell.

There is this historical karma also. We don't just reap what we sow individually and socially; we reap what others have sown historically. Our speaker, Nehla Harb, talked about trauma and generational trauma. When she was speaking, I was thinking that this is karma from a historical perspective, where your great-great-grandfather might have been a slave owner who treated people as property and as subhuman.

Today, that has rippling effects in the United States, where wealth distribution is dramatically divergent. Between white and black families, for example, the average white family in the United States has ten times more generational wealth than the average black family. Over half of black children in the United States live in poverty, while only one out of eleven white children lives in poverty. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons and the daughters. The historical ripples of what has been done in the past come down to us in the present.

You might say, 'But I am not a slave owner. I shouldn't be suffering these consequences.' Well, Michael, you're not—you're white. But imagine if you were a Black American. Imagine that. Do they deserve less because of the historical ripples of the past? Or ought we to have policies in the present that seek to redress those historical injustices of the past? We must at least admit that they exist as an injustice, and then we need to address the lingering effects of colonialism, neocolonialism, and the rest.

Yes, the Israelis today are engaging in a genocide, but it is not anti-Jewish to say that Zionism is an ideology. We must understand the historical, generational trauma of many Jewish people—not just from the Holocaust of World War II and the six million killed in the gas chambers of Adolf Hitler, but from previous generations of Christian pogroms in Russia and elsewhere, reflecting an anti-Semitism that ran deep even in my own family. These things need to be admitted and redressed as well as we can. I am not excusing current Israeli policy; I am simply saying that rather than simply condemning it, I want to understand it. In understanding it, hopefully, we can help others see that they are simply perpetuating more and more generational trauma. The genocide of Palestinians today will come back to haunt us for many years to come globally.

Lastly, and for Gandhi essentially, there is an organic relationship of means to ends. Organic. If you want an apple tree, you plant an apple seed. You are not going to grow apples from a banana tree. If you want democracy, you must plant the seeds of democracy and respect whichever democratic tradition you want to endorse. Gandhi himself believed far more in decentralized, participatory democracy. But whatever it is—even representative democracy—you need to sow it if you want to reap it.

This is a fundamental disagreement between Gandhi and Marx, for example, because Marx does not believe in any absolutes; everything is always changing. And so, for Marx, and particularly for Marxist-Leninists of different kinds, you can sow a dictatorship and reap a democracy. You can get an apple from a banana tree. Gandhi fundamentally says no.

Now, he doesn't prove no; he assumes no. He sees the consequences of the past in the present, and he infers that you reap what you sow—not just individually and socially, but historically. And if you want a world at peace with itself—a just peace, a positive peace—you must sow the seeds of that now. Do not compromise your means, because your means become the end.

You might say, 'No, no, no, no. I believe that the ends justify the means.' Gandhi would say you can, of course, believe what you want, but it is going to have consequences. For Gandhi, the means justify the end. The apple seed becomes the apple tree. Democratic processes breed democracy. You reap what you sow. So always, and at all times, do your best to be pure in your means—as pure as you can be—because it is not just you who will reap the results. It will be future generations.

If what you are doing today is sufficiently contrary to Rita—the laws of God, the law of love—the human species may destroy itself. Don't blame that on God. You will have reaped what you have sown. Change now so you can start new traditions and new cultural norms within the dying carcass of the old. You can always start now with yourself. Surrender your body and your mind to the Self that is your soul within you, and you may find miraculous possibilities in the future. They are not miraculous; you may simply be reaping much better fruit than what you now see being consumed.

We are now finished. I have rambled long and hard on assumptions. In our next session tomorrow, we will not be talking so much about tactical nonviolence, but about Gandhi's beliefs in principled nonviolence, which will flow directly out of these assumptions.

For our breakout sessions,I would like you to reflect on Rita, the Golden Rule, and especially the Law of Karma. Do you more agree or disagree with Gandhi's worldview on the assumption level?

Fundamentally, if you just need to focus on one thing, ask yourselves: do the ends justify the means, or is it more true that the means justify the ends? They both may be true—non-dualism. And yet, where do you stand if you want to lean to one side or the other?

Feedback from Group Discussions

 Moderator: I think everyone has rejoined the main group now. May I request Group Number One to share your thoughts on whatever you discussed in your breakout room?

Group Number One: Regarding today's session, what you delivered was so broad that it was very difficult to encapsulate in a very short breakout session. Still, we discussed a few things. Mainly, we were talking about the Golden Rule and karma. We know that especially people in power, who have the capacity to make a change, often know exactly how things should be done. But when it comes to walking the talk, it just doesn't happen. People speak one way and act another; that is the stark reality of the world. Even though we know Rita—the cosmic rule—and we know what is good, those good things don't always manifest on the ground. That was one major thing we pondered upon.

We also discussed the Gandhian principle of simplicity, which you also mentioned—not just as simplicity in a direct sense, but as actively incorporating one's beliefs into actual work. We concluded by discussing what you mentioned at the very end: the incredibly thoughtful and deep concept of 'the means becoming the end.' We usually separate those two things; we think the means simply lead to the end. But the idea of the means becoming the end is something entirely new to me personally. It was highly insightful, and that is what we spoke about. Thank you so much.

Group Number Two: In Group Two, we discussed the Law of Karma and its effects on society. Mainly, our participants had a big question. Common people genuinely believe in the Law of Karma, but the politicians in many countries do not seem to believe in it based on how they treat others. That remains a massive question mark for us, and we feel we need an answer to that. We also spoke about the Law of Karma in relation to Gandhiji's core principles of nonviolence and Satyagraha.

Group Number Three: We discussed the Law of Karma and Gandhi's specific understanding of it. We related this to the current situation in the Middle East, noting how terrific the war is and how many innocent lives are being lost due to non-state activities and actions causing harm to humanity. Looking at the Law of Karma, if we want peace there, we need to develop peaceful activities and strategies so that peaceful thoughts can develop in the minds of the people who are causing this harm.

We also discussed the oneness of God and how, if we consider that everything belongs to God—a core Gandhian philosophy—then greed will not overcome us. Whatever we achieve in life, we will do so without greediness. Keeping ourselves away from greed makes our individual path and humanity's collective path much easier.

One fellow gave a beautiful example of karma that is deeply rooted in Indian and Hindu philosophy: if you throw mud, the mud will always get on you as well. If we want to keep dirt, greed, and impurities away from ourselves, we just need to keep ourselves away from those negative actions.

Group Number Four: In addition to what the other presenters have mentioned, we think Gandhi also made us realize that the Law of Karma is not merely a religious or ritualistic practice; it is simply a moral and spiritual law of life. It applies categorically across individual, social, and historical perspectives, as well as through an organic relationship, making it a universal law.

We also realized that one cannot escape karma. If you do good, you receive good. If you want peace, you must be peaceful. If you want freedom, you must give freedom to others. Equally, if you want honesty from the world, you must be honest yourself. That is what the Gandhian perspective brings to the concept of karma.

Group Number Five: In our last breakout group, we discussed Rita—the all-encompassing cosmic order that represents everything unchanging, natural, and moral. We correlated this concept with the Pramanas (the means of valid knowledge) of Indian philosophy. As we noted, Mahatma Gandhi did not approach Advaita Vedanta (non-dualism) as a purely text-bound or abstract academic exercise. Instead, he contextualized these traditional Pramanas through his own personal experiences and his 'Experiments with Truth.'

For Gandhi, validating structural reality relied heavily on Pratyaksha (direct perception), which was his direct observation of systemic violence and human suffering. This was blended smoothly with Anumana (logical inference), allowing him to infer the unseen moral laws of the cosmos, or Rita, by observing the tangible, natural consequences of systemic greed and hatred. Ultimately, his personal conscience functioned as a living epistemological tool, beautifully bridging spiritual Advaita—the fundamental unity of all existence—with immediate, compassionate social action rooted in day-to-day life and modern realities.

Concluding Remarks from the speaker

My goodness, and we have done it! Excellent timing. Thank you, everyone. In our next session, we will be looking specifically at Gandhi's beliefs and goals, and I look forward to sharing that with you and to having an even better discussion tomorrow.

Nonviolence Healing Paths from Violence and Trauma Dr. Nahla Harb

 

October 17, 2026

Healing from Trauma and Violence: Resilience and Nonviolence
Dr. Nahla Harb

Academic University College for Non-Violence and Human Rights (AUNOHR), Lebanon

 

Introduction and Welcome
Dr. Siby K. Joseph, Director, IFPNP

Friends, as it was announced, today in our midst we have Dr. Nahla Harb for the International Dialogue of IFPNP. Originally from Lebanon, she earned her PhD from the Lebanese University. She is basically a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist.

She has been one of the pillars of this IFPNP International Dialogue. She has been associating with this program from the very beginning, representing the Academic University College for Non-Violence and Human Rights (AUNOHR), Lebanon. She basically serves as a lecturer and trainer at the university, specializing in the areas of nonviolent conflict resolution, family and school mediation, self-rehabilitation, and self-care.

She held very important positions. She served as the General Coordinator of the School Counselling Unit (DOPS) and child protection framework at the Ministry of Education and Higher Education in Lebanon, in which she was designated to be its delegate to the national strategy of preventing violent extremism. She was a fellow of the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Middle East Professional Learning Initiative (MEPLI) and a facilitator of education design in 2020–2021. She studied at the Harvard Kennedy School, completing their program in Implementing Public Policy. Her responsibilities cover a range of mental health services in public education, and she was the chief of the official exam centre for learning difficulties and special needs.

It is our good fortune that such a person, who has both the academic training and field experience, is in our midst to deliberate on a very important topic: "Nonviolence: The Healing Path from Violence and Trauma." She will be focusing on resilience and nonviolence in the course of this presentation.

With this brief introduction, on behalf of everyone, I request Dr. Nahla Harb to start the session. The organizers are very pleased to welcome you all for this session. Thanks once again. Thank you all.

Dr. Nahla Harb

Thank you, Dr. Siby K. Joseph, and thank you all for having me and for the warm welcome. Actually, it is my pleasure and my honour to be with you every year in this international dialogue and to share with you some of my thoughts and the experience we have been having—especially in a very complex context like Lebanon recently.

What I hope for is that it could be like an active discussion, because every context has different paths for healing, especially from trauma and violence. I will not be presenting a recipe, a single model, or a "one size fits all" solution. These are just entry points that could serve anyone who has been experiencing trauma or violence to start with, because the healing process is a long-term process. Sometimes we think we are resilient and we think we are healed, but in fact, one single incident could show us different hidden caves in our unconscious that were not tackled.

In this session, we are going to continue somehow what we discussed last year. Last year, we started with the roots of violence and nonviolence within our system—within our psychological system. Are we made to be violent or not?

We noticed that there is a difference between aggressivity—even in the origin of the word—and violence. So, yes, we have aggressivity in our system, but what does it take to turn it into violence? We are going to talk a little bit about the contexts, the different types of violence, and how to heal—how can we start healing.

Regarding the context, I would like to present this ecosystemic model of Urie Bronfenbrenner. If you notice, there is the person in the middle in dark orange—the person and all the characteristics of the person that could help or be like an obstacle or a challenge between the trauma and the healing. Then there is the microsystem—the direct systems that are related to the person: family, work, friends, and so on. Then there is the mesosystem—those systems that talk to each other, the community. And then there is the exosystem and the social interaction, and so on. Then the macrosystem—the politics, the values, the culture.

But underneath all of these systems, there is time—the chronosystem. There is also this transgenerational element that sometimes is not shown; we cannot see it, and we just live it. Somehow, we cannot even feel it directly—we feel only its manifestations and we feel its consequences.

Why am I presenting these systems? It is to say that when in one of these systems, even if they are not too close to the person in the middle—if you can notice the arrows—there are paths for trauma and there are paths for violence. So, if our macrosystem—meaning the social norms, the values—holds a lot of violent connotations, violent excuses, or justifications for violence, somehow, it will get to us. Even if we do not like it, even if we have this attitude of refusing violence, somehow, it gets into us; it is diffused to our system without us knowing.

But again, if this dot is the person in the here and now, everything underneath it in their personal path is accumulating toward this moment. This moment could be either a decision of not engaging in a violent incident, or a decision to engage in a violent conflict or a violent moment. So, this is the person, and this is their path—their personal path.

There is also the path and all the history of the different systems. Why are they in light colours? Because they are like shadows. Our systems, we cannot concretely touch them necessarily; they are our shadows. They are like shadows that come and go without us noticing necessarily in every moment, but eventually, we feel their ultimate consequences. These shadows create this moment, which is a mosaic—a combination of those different systems.

The circle upstairs is this moment: the here and now. The here and now of you, me, and of every person is this mix of all the shadows of different systems. I can speak about Lebanon. Lebanon is experiencing lots of violence from the different shadows, and every shadow has the “creativity” of violence. This is why, when a person decides to be a nonviolent person in the middle of everything, there will be resistance, there will be challenges, and there will be a high cost. We will see how we can manage all of that toward a nonviolent resilience, because I believe there is no resilience in violence.

Okay. So, this moment is the direct violence. If it is violent, it is direct violence stemming from a hidden form of violence, which is the cultural violence in the macrosystem. Even in the microsystem within the family, if there is domestic violence and it is "okay" to be beaten, or "okay" to be disciplined violently—if it is okay, then there is cultural violence all across these systems, and then comes the structural violence.

All these regulations that establish violence as something normal. For example, recently, the international entities—the UN and INGOs—they speak about the "new normal," and in this new normal, there is nothing normal. It is just setting new standards for what is okay and what is not okay. This new normal is something really dangerous between cultural violence and structural violence most of the times. So, to have a few victims is considered okay in certain circumstances, but not “a lot” of victims. So it becomes a question of numbers, not about the fact itself.

It is okay that there is discrimination among the people “just a little bit”. So, the numbers now justify, excuse, or mitigate the effect of what is happening. These forms of violence are, of course, stemming from what Johan Galtung explains in his model and his theory: the cultural and structural violence. So back to our integrative model, these moments of direct violence in the “here and now” are stemming from the past, the very far past mostly, the transgenerational past—creating this feeling of oscillation between pain from our past and fear for our future.

So, this moment, the here and now, goes back and forth between the pain of the past and the fear of the future. It creates another triangle, a reversed triangle, because if we are not addressing the cultural violence or the structural violence across all these systems, this triangle that is converging into the here and now will regrow to the tomorrow and there. The “here and now” would be this intersection between two violent structures.

We will refer to this accumulation as the vertical types of violence—the transgenerational types. When our ancestors were subject to violence, or our families excused and justified violence in the intergenerational relationship and dynamic, all of this path creates a moment where saying "no" to violence is not so easy. It has to be designed, because the cost could be really high if it is not well planned.

The other dimension of violence is the horizontal. What do I mean by horizontal? The horizontal dimension of trauma and violence is what is coexisting. It’s the forms of violence that coexist in every here and now? For example, we could be subject to structural violence in the macrosystem and in the mesosystem—mesosystem meaning the community level. we could be subject to cultural violence in our families, in our community, and in the macrosystem. All these mixes, all these forms of violence that could coexist in the here and now, are considered the horizontal types.

So, back to Galtung, direct violence is the manifestation of two bigger and hidden forms of violence, which are cultural violence and structural violence. They prepare for direct violence. They justify direct violence and they make it seem normal. One of my friends told me, "Remember that slavery was once legal." So, this is structural and cultural violence. Slavery was considered okay.

Another model or representation is stemming from Karpman drama triangle, where the imbalance of power creates a possibility of violence. For example, some people have a lot of resources; some others do not. Some people are physically strong; some others are not. Some people come from a very wealthy socioeconomic background; some others do not.

This imbalance or inequality is normal by itself, but it could create and transform people, countries, groups of people, or small groups of people from being two equal parties into a higher group and a lower group. When this imbalance of power is established, sometimes it transforms the higher group or the more resourceful group into a persecutor, and the less privileged group or person into a victim.

The dynamic starts from this imbalance of power to a status where a persecutor can carry out this exploitation, can impose his/her/their rules, and can force others to do things. When this is established, the persecutor carries out this obligation and makes the victim like a slave—like a slave.

Within this dynamic, somewhere another person—who is a saviour, or who is presented like a hero or a saviour—could come and try to find his or her benefits within this dynamic. They form a coalition with the victim. They start with a good dynamic with the victim and they support the victim in a way that is also a higher and lower level, because they come as a saviour. They present themselves as higher because saviours are stronger, saviours are higher, and saviours are more resourceful. They present the solution as their work and or achievement, as their job, or as the consequence of their intervention, without any participation from the person underneath—or the person they consider underneath.

What will happen? They will be friends together against the persecutor, creating an escalating chain of violence. Now, the saviour and the first victim are together the new persecutors. The saviour looks like a saviour, but in fact, together they become the new persecutors, and they justify their violence as a reaction to the first violence. This is very dangerous because not only does it take us in a vicious circle of violence, but it takes us into a spiral of violence—an escalation.

This modality repeats itself, but unfortunately with an increase of violence and a diversity of its forms, like symbolic violence. Instead of stopping what is happening, they are escalating what is happening with different faces.

So, what wounds could this create to everyone? The common types of wounds are usually related to abandonment—abandonment and neglect that stem from the same psychological root.

They eliminate the support, and they create this sense of loneliness and this sense of the impossibility of changing. Somehow, they create guilt: "Maybe it is my fault that this is happening to me."

Another type of wound is loss: "I lost someone or something". This happens a lot in wars, and conflicts. Even without losing the person to death, losing the contact by itself is a loss because we lose a person, we lose an asset.

Another type is the wound of trust. Trust here is a very complex concept. Trust is not just "I like you, so I trust you." Trust has different dimensions to be well-informed trust.

There is also the wound of anxiety—anxiety as this expectation and anticipation that something bad is going to happen anytime soon. We see it in PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Mostly, people who have been exposed to violence and trauma experience these symptoms.

Then there is shame. Shame and guilt are like two sides of the same coin. Shame and guilt make the person feel less of themselves, leading to a feeling of unworthiness. If you listen to people explain why they reacted in a certain way, they say, "He acts with me like I am nothing," or "She deals with me like I am nobody." This feeling of unworthiness is like the elimination—the symbolic elimination—of a person.

Adding to that are these transgenerational aggressions, the wounds of the past. This anger of the past creates a kind of anger or a surrender in the here and now. Also, there are the wounds of the present and the wounds of the future. You might ask, "the wounds of the future, how?" We prepare our future wounds starting from now. When we do not heal from our past, we recreate different manifestations of wounds in the future.

What are the normal reactions? The fight, flight, freeze modalities, and the fawn response—there are many others, but these are the main ones. They call them normal reactions to abnormal situations, and yet, nothing is easy about them.

The fight mode: when it is violent— there would be the feeling of full power reacting to powerless. Within this violent fight—and not all fights modes are violent, by the way, we need to say that some fights are not violent, they are healthy confrontations—but when the fight mood becomes violent, there is a transgression of the frame, of the norms, and there is a cutting of contact and an eliminating of the other.

The flight mode: when it is violent—the person feels powerless, experiencing ambiguity of the frame, not knowing what is happening to them: "Do we deserve this? Why?" There is the blame, the guilt. Also, there is a cutting of contact: "I do not want to engage with these people anymore. I do not want to talk to them. I do not wish to see them. I am just running away." Of course, not all flight modes are violent; some of them are well-calculated and well-measured, where the withdrawal is strategic.

And the freeze mode: when we don’t react, not strategically for example, because we are waiting to see or to know more data, or to collect more evidence, or to really think about a solution, but because the freeze mode here is, "I am afraid, I do not know what to do." I am frozen.

Interactive Session of International Dialogue

Q& A Session

Okay, now the floor is open to questions and comments relating to the theme until now?

Question: Where does the guilt come from? Does the victim blame themselves? Is that the guilt part?

Answer: Well, the guilt is a very interesting topic. Actually, the guilt stems from childhood, where the person who is a grown-up right now thinks everything is their fault. Why? Because of a system of education that is full of guilt. Mostly, our religions force guilt into our education. You cannot say "no" to your dad and mom— because it is a sin. You cannot question authority.

So, whenever something bad happens to us, or maybe if we fall ill—if we are sick—at once people say, "Oh, you do not deserve that." But we are sick because this is nature. Why do you consider sickness as a punishment? It stems from the cultural modality of violence, as if to say, "If you do something wrong, something bad is going to happen to you." Well, not always. For most of the authoritarian leaders—nothing happens to them. They were killing lots and lots of people, and nothing is happening to them.

So, being ill, receiving a punishment, or linking the idea that "I made a mistake" to "I deserve a punishment"—this is what feeling guilty is about. It is about internalizing every negative thing that is happening and thinking, "Well, it is mine. I did something wrong, and I am the person to blame." With this compensation mode, "I have to be punished." And this guilt does not have a size.

When we speak about nonviolent education, we need to differentiate between understanding our mistake—because a mistake is something normal in our development, and it has a size (consequences), it has a context: a beginning, and an end, and it can be compensated for with some restorative measures, and we learn from mistakes—we need to see the difference between understanding a mistake and feeling guilty. Feeling guilty is not related to the mistake itself. It is related to the judgment of a person toward themselves. It is a judgment: "I am bad." It is no longer, "I did something bad"; it is, "I am bad." It does not have a start, it does not have an end, and it does not allow for restorative measures.

For instance, a person who feels guilty says "sorry" all the time. Even when they are not making any mistakes, you feel that they have a constant need for reassurance and validation: for example, they keep asking people: "Are you okay? Are you angry with me? Are you sad with me? I am really sorry if I offended you," without any offense having occurred. This stems also from the dynamic with the parents in early childhood, around three or four years old, when the Oedipus complex is being resolved. If the feelings toward the parent of the same sex are not well resolved there, it will reappear later on and it will influence the whole personality.

Our cultural systems also allow us to feel guilty. The first sin—what is the first sin? This is what makes us feel guilty. And obedience—why are we punished if we are not obedient? Obedience is a very dangerous concept. It is a violent concept, actually. Obedience means you have to say "yes." You cannot say "no," even if you do not agree. That means you are not allowed to think. That means you are not allowed to participate as an equal especially in dignity.

If you go back to old mythology, most of it punishes the people who are not obedient. If we look at Prometheus, when he stole fire from the gods to give it to the people so that they could live better, he was punished. He was punished for not being obedient. He was doing good for the people, but he was punished for not being obedient to Zeus and the other gods. Then, when Hercules wanted to save him from where he was bound on the mountains, the gods allowed it on one condition: he had to wear a bracelet with a stone from that mountain on his hand to remember his punishment because he was not obedient. With time, this bracelet became the engagement ring with a diamond stone to remind only ladies that they should be obedient. Men do not wear this engagement ring.

So, obedience, guilt, and this societal structure have a lot to do with each other. Guilt is not an okay feeling. It is not a normal feeling. It is a feeling that serves as a red flag. Something is wrong in the system—in the cultural system. People can understand their mistakes, people can correct their mistakes, and people can compensate for their mistakes, but feeling guilty all the time is not healthy. It is a very alarming modality.

Question: I am thinking of unworthiness—that type of wound which is on the bottom of the scale but probably a result of the rest. How do you approach combating that? Through forgiveness, through self-respect? How do you heal unworthiness?

 Answer: Not just through forgiveness, because forgiveness by itself is like accepting where you are and you forgive. Unworthiness is approached usually by modalities of self-efficacy. Because it also stems from early childhood, the self-efficacy modality is to measure—scientifically, really, and concretely—what I can do and what I cannot do, and to situate myself well.

If you notice these wounds, there is ambiguity in all of them. They are like judgments, and there is ambiguity in most of them. Saying, "I am unworthy," "I am really neglected," "I am left behind," or "I am abandoned"—it is like a judgment, a static judgment. A judgment usually lacks a dynamic aspect. When we need to tackle one of those wounds—even if I say, "I am guilty," "I am anxious," or "I am ashamed"—which are general judgments. People do not say, "I am ashamed of this specific situation, and I will make it better." No, they say, "I am ashamed. I do not know what to do. I cannot face people." It comes across as if the judgment is a general judgment of the person.

One of these wounds is unworthiness. That is why one important strategy is to divide self-efficacy into different dimensions and to go with measurement. Well, you feel unworthy? How? Because of this specific incident? What are you doing with your family? What are you doing at your work? What are your attitudes with your friends, and who are you?

We are going to see this now in the healing processes. Especially when we perceive that there is a high cost, and despite that, we are willing to pay for it because the end product will be our identity and something really valuable—really valuable, not just expensive in terms of cost, but truly valuable, and we will be genuinely willing to pay it. Unworthiness is a general feeling, and there is ambiguity when trying to face it. To face it, we need to make it clear.

Clarity is one of the paths, alongside evidence-based self-efficacy modalities. If we have time, I can present one of the activities that is related to self-efficacy and that would tackle the feeling of unworthiness.

 

 Question: Dr. Nahla, thank you, it is such a poignant presentation. There is obvious violence that we understand, but you also showed some subtlety of violence that we may not even recognize. Thank you for the insightful presentation. I have one doubt—I may not understand clearly. You mentioned the nexus between the saviour and the persecutor. So, is it a universal thing, or is it only in certain cases that it happens?

Answer: Yes. Well, this triangle—the Karpman triangle—is also called the drama triangle or the triangle of violence. So, when this happens, yes, it could happen universally as in every context, but it could be changed as well. This is one of the patterns but not a fatality. It is not like, "This is what will happen and we cannot do anything about it."

Change could happen from different entry points. We have three entry points for this triangle—the drama triangle. One of the entry points is from the victim side. If the victim empowers themselves, they would become more resourceful, and they rebel. They do not accept that someone is abusing them, and they do not accept these forms of violence and they could face the persecutor directly.

We notice, for example, in domestic violence, if the wife or the husband was not working, when they start to work, they start saying "no" a lot to things they never said "no" to before. Or maybe the children, when they grow up, if they consider their parents to be persecutors, they start to stand up and face them. So, one entry point is that the victim becomes more powerful.

Another entry point is when the victim and the saviour have an understanding about the cost of what is happening. Here, we have two types of saviours. We have the saviour who is an outsider using the victim because they need something from the persecutor, they have a profit in attacking the persecutor, or they need some profit from the victim herself. Alternatively, the saviour could be someone who has a very good intention toward the victim. For example, it could be a parent. They love their children, but they always act like saviours to them.

These two types of saviours have different modalities for healing from this drama triangle—for this triangle of violence.

Option number one: if the saviour is another persecutor—a masked persecutor—then the victim needs to be aware, and they should set the price for this help from the beginning. This is why awareness is something really important. For example, between countries: "Oh, I will help you against your neighbour who is attacking you, but I need your oil." There is always a "but" in the dialogue. "I will help you, but you will have to give me all your research or water etc.."

So, if the saviour is not someone who truly cares about the victim—if it is not a parent, for example—the awareness of the victim is really important to set the cost, and the defined price for this connection with the saviour, and to set the boundaries. We are going to talk about boundaries in a minute.  The victim got to ask: “You are going to save me from what? You are going to help me in what, exactly? And how much will that cost me?” There has to be a frame. It cannot be an ambiguous support. If saviours consider themselves just absolute saviours, there won't be any frame, and this is how you can identify a problem in the dynamic.

So, this is number one: by a frame, a cost, and an understanding.

If this saviour is a parent—someone who really cares about the victim—some parents act like that. If their children have a problem at school, they will go and save them and stand beside them, even if the children made lots of mistakes. The awareness here is for the saviour to learn how to transform their position from a saviour into a coach—to a supporter, not a saviour—because when you create the solution for someone else, you are disabling them.

There was this research about butterflies. In one lab, they did this research: when the butterfly laid its eggs, the researchers helped the eggs hatch just a couple of hours ahead of the real date, and then they started their observation. They noticed that when these caterpillars grew up to be butterflies, the ones that were helped when they were in the eggs could not fly. They could not fly. Why? Because this help, which was not needed, disabled them from developing the muscles required to fly when they grew up.

That is what happens with parents who play the role of a saviour. They actually disable their children. That is why we need to change this triangle—to invert it. The persecutor would become a challenger, a normal challenge—not an overly powerful person, not omnipotent. The victim could become a creator—a creator of a new possibility, of a new existence. They could use the help of a saviour who acts as a coach—a coach and a support—without giving them the full power of acting on their behalf.

 

Question: You talked about aggressivity. My question is, at what point does that aggressivity become violence?

 Answer: That is a very important question. I love it. Usually, there are different criteria for a position of aggressivity and a position of violence. Aggressivity stems from the word ad-gressere in Latin, which means going towards. Towards who? Towards the other, which means looking for contact with the other. Whereas violence comes from the word violare. Violare means using extreme force to eliminate the other, which means looking to end contact. So, when I abuse power to eliminate the other and to break the contact—to end this contact—I am in violence. When I go and do this confrontation with the other, if it is to eliminate the other and end contact, then I am in violence.

Also, aggressivity can work within the frame, within the respect of values, and within the respect of the other person. So, it can be very creative, and we need this aggressivity to survive. We need it. Whereas in violence, there is a break of the frame. There is a breach of the rights of the other, and there is an elimination of this other.

Mainly, aggressivity cares about the self and the other, which are the two basic instincts in the human being: self-preservation and the preservation of the species. So for self-preservation, well, I have to stand up for my rights. I have to stand up for what I need, for my needs. I have to stand up if there is something wrong. That is aggressivity, which is totally okay and natural. But in violence, I need to eliminate the other to feel powerful again and to feel “satisfied” about myself. This is very dangerous because violence creates a vicious spiral, not just a circle.

Question: Thank you, Dr. Siby, and thank you, Dr. Nahla. I agree to a very large extent. I agree with the analogies and contextualization that you gave toward the topics. But again, I want to ask: I need you to shed more light with regard to the context of disobedience. If obedience tends toward violence, why do we have laws, rules, and guides that frame how we live—whether at the minimal social level, call it family or organization, or at a country level? At what point do we see obedience as not being violent if there are laws, rules, and regulations?

Answer: That is a very nice question. Usually, when we work with education, we also highlight the difference between abiding by the laws and respecting regualtions, and being obedient. Respecting the law is a social contract. Rules usually come to organize social contracts among individuals and among social institutions and countries etc.. When we are abiding by the law, we agree to deal with each other within the frame of this social contract, where every action has its responsibility and every action has consequences.

Of course, we are responsible for what we are doing. But responsibility has different frames. Even in legal frames, we deal with young people—minors—differently from adults. Why? Because mistakes are normal in their development. Usually, they have to restore them by doing good for society because there is a responsibility; they harmed someone and they have to take full responsibility with corrective measures, which also serve as a manual for their adulthood.

Whereas being obedient usually means being obedient to other people who are in a position of authority. This is why in our cultural and structural systems, sometimes when there is a leader—one person who decides—people simply obey this leader, and we find ourselves in a violent system.

But when it is a system of dialogue and respect, people can say "no." People can update laws and regulations. In an obedience modality, we are not allowed to question even the laws. Once you question the law, you are viewed as someone who is really harmful to the system. This is why the obedience modality creates years and years of misery without people daring to question the leader or the system.

However, when you are in a system where it is okay to question, we are abiding by the law. We are abiding by the rules, and the rules serve us all. If the rules are not serving us, let us think about them again and let us upgrade them. We are abiding by a social contract; we are not obedient to this social contract. It is a dynamic contract that deals with the needs of all people—not a system where someone orders and the rest have to follow.

Question: I have never fully understood the difference between self-esteem and self-confidence, but I believe we are born with high self-esteem. When it comes to something like violence, what does it actually affect? Does it impact our self-esteem, our self-confidence, or both? Furthermore, does our self-esteem remain the same as we grow into adulthood?

 Answer: Regarding self-esteem and self-confidence: actually, when we are speaking about healing, usually some of our colleague’s use "increase self-esteem" and "increase self-confidence" interchangeably. This is very dangerous because if you increase the self-esteem and the self-confidence of a person and you tell them, "Oh go, you can do it, you are very strong, you can go jump from the third floor and nothing is going to happen to you," it is really dangerous.

What we need to have is a moderate and grounded self-esteem. Yes, trauma and violence both affect self-esteem and self-confidence, especially through this feeling of unworthiness. So, what we do and what we tackle is to go through self-efficacy, because self-efficacy can moderate self-esteem. We do not want people to think of themselves as really higher than their capacities because that is dangerous. But we do not want people to think less of their capacities—nor of themselves, but of their capacities.

In a nonviolent situation, people have this self-respect for themselves regardless of their capacities. Capacities are something that could grow or could be less at different moments in life, but it should not affect their self-respect. Self-respect is accepting oneself with their weaknesses, with their strengths, with their moments of high and their moments of low, and not accepting to be judged by others. They know themselves.

Using these two concepts interchangeably creates confusion. But what is more important for someone is to know their efficacy on different levels, to have self-respect regardless of their power, and to have respect for others regardless of their power. In a system of violence, people only respect the more powerful, and that really breaks moral values. In a system of nonviolence, people respect every person as a person, and they can assess efficacy, strengths, weaknesses, and attitudes—they can assess anything. But they do not judge people as lower, inferior, or superior.

 Question:  You spoke about transgenerational trauma. I was thinking about how we can distinguish between the trauma that is actually passed between generations through parenting, and the other that is passed through generations via culture. Is there a difference between the cultural, biological, or memory parts, and how can we distinguish between those parts?

Answer: I would like to highlight that resilience from trauma can be very different from resilience from violence. This difference is very delicate. If a trauma comes from a coincidence, like a car accident, it is still a trauma. But if it comes from violence—where someone deliberately tried to hurt someone else because they think of them as inferior—it has a different path of healing. In general trauma could be anything; you do not have to be inferior to be traumatized. But when it is violence, the persecutor actively puts us in an inferior position. Violence, yes, creates trauma, but trauma does not necessarily come from violence; it could come from different sources. Therefore, healing from violence has an additional component related to people's dignity and identity. This is an additional dimension in their resilience compared to resilience from normal or regular trauma.

In true resilience, violence is not present. If violence is directed toward the other, then we are not resilient because we are not healthy. Why? Because the instinct of preserving the species is jeopardized. It is not healthy; we are in a state of deviation. This is why resilience and being psychologically healthy means being someone who does not want to eliminate the other, someone who does not want to hurt the other to prove themselves, and someone who goes toward the other and opens up—not someone who is scared of the other or who breaks contact with the other.

 Question: Could you clarify the difference between intergenerational and transgenerational trauma, and how we can differentiate them? It feels quite abstract to us, and it is difficult to figure out without a specific method or approach.

Answer: Yes. Actually, the intergenerational is a small component of the transgenerational. The transgenerational is wider and bigger way the intergenerational, though the intergenerational is deeply affected by it. The intergenerational is more direct as a trauma—it is more direct between immediate generations. The transgenerational, however, can manifest as a very indirect trauma.

For example, one of the patients I have been seeing for a while had an eating disorder. When we looked into her intergenerational relationships, she had issues with anorexia, she had issues with her mom, and she had issues with the aggressivity and the violence in the cultural system. She did not like her femininity because she had problems with her mom.

But when we went deeper into the transgenerational history, we noticed that one of her great-great-grandmothers died from famine during the World War. We noticed there were different issues relating to food and nutrition back then. Once we noticed that, we understood. We had been tackling the intergenerational aspects—the mom issues, the femininity issues, the media image of a female—but there was still a kind of resistance. When we went back to the transgenerational level, we were shocked. Many people among her transgenerational ancestors had issues related to nutrition, especially this great-great-grandmother who died from famine.

Sometimes the transgenerational is not so obvious to detect. There are specific tools, such as genograms, and different psychotherapeutic methods to investigate through it. It is not always obvious; you have to actively look for it.

Question: How do we deal with neglect and shame wounds?

Answer: Neglect creates shame because neglect has an exterior component—the actor is external; someone neglects us. But shame is a consequence. First, being neglected is one of the most difficult wounds to treat because it affects the perception a person has toward themselves, especially regarding unworthiness: "I do not deserve it." We notice this with children in orphanages, especially if they have parents who are alive but placed them there like a boarding school, but they are not orphans. Those children develop a serious deep sense of unworthiness, feeling they do not deserve to be happy. So they do everything to act like a magnet for unhappiness.

To heal neglect, the easiest way is to find an alternative source of love—an alternative, healthy source of love—whether through institutions, especially educational institutions, or within personal relationships. Secondly, is to seek professional help because this is really tricky. When we suffer from neglect, it is not easy; sometimes we run away from our happiness. This is common between neglect, shame, and guilt.

Whereas with shame, we need to heal and address the system of moral values. We need to reframe the cause of the shame, and some measures are restorative for the cause of shame. For example, in our context, sexual relationships before marriage are not accepted in our culture. For girls, it is not acceptable, whereas for boys, it is accepted. When a girl does that, her sense of shame can take her sometimes to suicide, or sometimes it stops her from starting any kind of relationship with others.

When you reframe it and you say, "Well, in this context it is not accepted, but maybe in another context you can go and start your family," it helps, because some of them will not start their families because they are ashamed that a husband would discover it. So, when they change their context—maybe if they travel—and some of them are well-educated women, when they change the context, they are liberated from this shame. Shame is like a prison. Reframing the problem, the reason, or the cause that provoked this shame is one of the good paths in the healing process the project of healing.

 Question: We talked about disobedience earlier, and you mentioned that it is a highly violent concept, which I agree with. However, from what I have noticed, whenever we choose to be disobedient, we are immediately subjected to intense shame. For example, if I disobey a rule, I am made to feel deeply ashamed of my actions simply because I did not comply. What is the societal psychology behind this dynamic, and why do people react this way?

 Answer: This is cultural violence. Absolutely. When we are disobedient, this judgment—this cultural judgment and this collective judgment on us—can be so tough. That is why in rigid systems, rigid cultural systems, and authoritarian systems, direct disobedience alone will not do it, because one person or a small group of people cannot face an entire system.

This is why in the strategies of nonviolent resistance; there are levels of confrontation. There are levels of facing violence and authoritarianism; we cannot face authoritarianism by being individually and directly disobedient. That is why in the healing process—and I do not think we are going to have time to fully look at it, but maybe I can show you just one slide with the skeleton of it—one of the strategies is that we need to design our confrontation. We need to design it carefully, not just in any random way. We need to assess it. We need to be very delicate about how to do it because one person cannot change a system.

There is something called the homeostasis of the system. It is like when you throw a stone into a river. The stone will create circles, which are “change”, but very soon the river will correct its path and those circles will disappear, no matter how big the stone was. To change something in the flow of this river, you need a system.

What to do? Maybe next year we can start from this point and how to do it. I just want to show this one slide because it was already in the presentation and it is very important to see how to deal with it.

The beginning of healing starts with knowledge, thinking, and detecting these contradictions. Detecting these contradictions means identifying: Where am I? What are my wounds, and how do I set my priorities? What are my needs, my desires, my meaning, and my identity in life? And then studying possibilities. It is not just about being disobedient; it is about studying possibilities, alternatives, and opportunities, and also studying the cost. Sometimes it is very difficult to change a whole system, so maybe you have to create an alternative system—a parallel system with some of the people who think the same way you do.

Second—and this is a big step—we are going to think about attitude change. How to plan for this change, and why is it important to me? What would this give me? What kind of benefit? How can I live differently?

And three, the third big component, is the change of behaviour and action as an iterative project. You can have Plan B, C, D, and Plan X—a Plan X which is very flexible. You have to be very flexible because violence is a rigid authoritarianism, and violence works within a very rigid system. They do not allow flexibility; they do not allow change. By being flexible, we are directly addressing the process of violence and its creative resistance. And then we must re-evaluate all the time.

That is what I can say very briefly. I hope we had some more time, but maybe next year we will start directly from the healing process.

 

 Concluding Remarks

Dr. Siby K.Joseph: Thank you very much. Now, I request Prof. Michael Sonnleitner to share his final comments and conclude this session.

 Dr. Michael Sonnleitner: Thank you, Dr. Siby. You always surprise me with these gifts. I have been taking extensive notes. Dr. Nahla, this has been an outstanding presentation. I do not give such accolades easily. You have covered a massive amount of ground. I will have to take at least a week or more to digest my single page of notes. I found the frameworks that you presented to be very provocative. Clearly, that was reflected in the range of questions that were brought up. The discussion could go on and on, and already I am inspired to slightly modify my presentation for next session so that it will partly flow from yours. Without getting into great detail, I do not know what more I can say except a really and sincere thank you. Much more came out that was useful to me from the interactions. Like many people, I believe the concepts are helpful; they are good frameworks. But when you bring it down to more specific examples—especially coming from our own lives—then it becomes a much greater learning opportunity. So, thank you for providing both the framework and a very fine learning opportunity.

Final closing words from the Speaker

Your words of appreciation mean a lot to me. Thank you all, and thank you for your questions and all your insights. Thank you very much, and thank you for the wonderful interaction. I like interaction more than just a standard presentation. It is always a pleasure. The questions open up windows and opportunities for reflection. Thank you so much, and have a wonderful journey through this this yearly IFPNP program.

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