The Vision of The Metta Center for Nonviolence
Humanity is slowly but steadily awakening to the underlying truth of our existence, which is our fundamental unity with one another and all of life. In this “new” vision, supported alike by the ancient wisdom traditions of virtually all cultures and by breakthroughs in very modern science, nonviolence is the norm for all relationships just as violence was acceptable and all but normalized in the vision of the world as separate, material, and without overall meaning. Nonviolence is, as Gandhi said, “not the inanity it has been taken for down the ages.” It is thus both a consequence and an enabling factor in this great awakening. It is no coincidence that nonviolence is increasing both quantitatively — with more than one-half of the world’s population experiencing a major manifestation in their home country — and qualitatively — with new forms of experimentation and learning across cultures increasingly practiced. Metta is proud to play a key role in developing this central part of the “great turning” to a more humane world.
The mission of the Metta Center is to promote the transition to a nonviolent future by making the logic, history, and yet-unexplored potential of nonviolence available to activists and agents of cultural change (which ultimately includes all of us). We help practitioners use nonviolence more safely and effectively, and anyone interested to understand and articulate it more fully.
The Dalai Lama Foundation participated with the Metta Center in the creation of Educators for Nonviolence [EFNV].
