I remember growing up on our blueberry farm in Georgia, spending most of my days outside in the sun with our dogs, horses and many other creatures of the wilderness. From my earliest years, I developed such a deep relationship with plants and animals that I have fond memories of carefully watching where I walked to avoid stepping on ants or other small beings that might come under foot. After all, I presumed—just because I was bigger, did not mean that my life was any more valuable. Perhaps that is why I now believe in interconnectedness of all things, or maybe this ideology was borne from studies of Buddhism and Eastern mysticism starting in middle school. Through this mindset, I developed a fundamental belief that all beings—great or small, strong or “weak”—had a role to play on this planet and a significant reason for their existence.
Based on the selected readings, this belief system seems most closely aligned with the concept of holistic Gaia-peace, or the concept that “everything is God” and all beings that exist have experienced life at some time and thus, are equally important to the cycle of life on the planet (Holmes & Gan, p. 286). While all the philosophies on peace are important toward achieving a nonviolent future, it seems to me that the holistic Gaia and inner/outer peace systems are fundamental to the establishment and success of all other peace methods outlined in the Groff & Smoker article; and thus, should be focused on first and foremost, before any other types of peace can even have hope of possibility (Groff & Smoker, n.d.).
Both the Gaia and inner/outer peace concepts take a holistic approach toward achieving peace, recognizing that it is the result of cohesion in a “total system,” yet the fundamental building block of this system is the individual—whether that be the individual human or any other species. Each individual, without experiencing true inner peace, cannot act externally in favor of peace. This furthers “the idea that the collective external world of outer peace is in some way a representation or image of the collective inner world of spiritual peace.” Additionally, from the perspective of sustaining peace and establishing nonviolence, the inner/outer and holistic Gaia connection would then require “nonviolent actions at every level, nonviolent structures at every level, and nonviolent processes and relationships between all living beings,” (Groff & Smoker, n.d.).
As one follows each decision of an individual to act violently or nonviolently—or peacefully/unpeacefully—upstream toward communal, national and multinational levels, we discover that:
“. . . .inner-outer peace would be manifest in all aspects of a culture of peace—including macro and micro social and economic institutions, local and global values, art, literature, music, technology, meditation and prayer. The resulting culture of peace would display a Gaia-like global pattern,” (Groff & Smoker, n.d.).
Thus, there is a distinct and clear relationship between the individual and the global/environmental pattern of peace; not unlike a single cell in the body and its direct connection to the heart through the bloodstream. This suggests that International Non-Governmental Organizations like the Nonviolent Peaceforce can provide peace-keeping services and teach peace-making methods on a community-based level, while the United Nations and European Union can work on a multi-national level to establish peace-oriented policies, which impact structural violence, but they must always do so with the understanding that “self-purification” of each individual team member, as in Gandhi’s five stage method, is paramount to organizational mission success (Nonviolent Peaceforce, n.d.).
Consequently, without individual inner/outer peace and a mindset toward holistic Gaia peace, all other theories will eventually turn back to violent means and cycle back to where they began. This is to say that each individual has both the responsibility and the power to bring about a new, nonviolent world order.
References
Chapple, C. (1993). Jaina cosmology and Gaia theory. In R. Holmes and B. Gan (Eds.), Nonviolence in theory and practice (pp. 317 – 321). Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.
Groff, L. & Smoker, P. (n.d.) Creating global-local cultures of peace. Retrieved from http://www.gmu.edu/programs/icar/pcs/smoker.htm
Nonviolent Peaceforce. [Organization’s website]. Retrieved from http://www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org/
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