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#3376 - Tuesday, December
9, 2008 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
James Traverse, long time Nonduality Salon contributor, has taught Yoga for 30 years. James was interviewed a couple weeks ago on CKDU radio of Dalhousie University: http://ckdu.dal.ca/32/20081112.13.31-15.11.mp3 (interview begins about one-fifth of the way through.)
"In true meditation there is no meditator."
Tuesday, Dec. 02, 2008
How to Prevent Another Mumbai
By Deepak Chopra
Before the economy eclipsed everything else, the country was
feeling better about Iraq. The war was winding down. The
insurgents were being steadily pacified. Then along came Mumbai,
and their 9/11, as Indians view it, and reignited our own past
fears. As the world watched the grueling, sickening violence
enacted against innocent victims, it was easy to push back as
aggressively as possible against the attackers and their like
everywhere.
In other words, kill them all.
But this wasn't our 9/11, and we've learned since then that
there's a second reaction to terrorism. One recognizes, wearily
but maturely, that killing every terrorist we can lay our hands
on isn't the same as killing their ideology. The jihadist's
ideology is barbaric, violent and senseless. But that isn't what
will wipe it out. Ideas can't be wiped out with force, much less
killed. There has to be a good reason for people to give them up.
America needs to deliver a Marshall Plan to the Arab world —
not in the form of money to rebuild war-torn cities but in the
form of ideas to rebuild violence-torn minds. We have no
alternative. In my yard there are stubborn patches of crabgrass.
It's tempting to take a weed whacker and chop them down, but the
crabgrass comes back twice as strong unless you get at its roots.
We learned in Vietnam that Ho Chi Minh's "hearts and
minds" approach could withstand burning showers of napalm
and carpet-bombing from B-52s. The poison of Islamic
fundamentalism will survive any aggression we mount against it.
Roots don't submit to violence. (Chop up a crabgrass root, and it
breeds a dozen new offspring.) You have to patiently dig and dig,
and never give up until the job's done.
The root causes of fanaticism aren't a mystery. Some are
external, like the rigid political oppression that exists in
almost every Arab country. Some are internal, lying in the
endemic ignorance and lack of education in those societies. Both
can be changed, however slow and difficult the process.
The real reason the surge worked in Iraq is that it first brought
an end to violence in Baghdad neighborhoods. Then American
soldiers kept watch while the Iraqis themselves nourished their
own peace. America has an enormous advantage in the Arab world:
the moderates vastly outnumber the fanatics. On their own, these
moderates haven't had the power or influence to change the hearts
and minds of the whole population, however. The guns on both
sides have been too loud.
The crucial thing is a change of direction on America's part.
Much of the widespread Muslim sympathy for al-Qaeda is based on
defensiveness, the attitude of people who feel attacked and
judged against. We should be able to police the threat of
terrorism without making more than a billion Muslims feel that
they have an enemy. And consider this: if you take the opposite
approach, refusing to dig out terrorism by its roots, you are
saying in effect that the jihad movement that affects every
Muslim country is rootless. That makes no sense at all, and it
will keep making no sense as long as we mistake killing
terrorists for killing terrorism.
Deepak Chopra is the author of Jesus: A
Story of Enlightenment http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Story-Enlightenment-Deepak-Chopra/dp/0061448737/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228866929&sr=1-1 and writes regularly at http://www.intent.com .
Find this article at: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1863408,00.html