A FEW days ago, before the bombing here and the shootings on Utoya Island, a friend and I were talking about how the joy of being alive always seems to go hand in hand with the sorrow that things change. Not even the brightest future can make up for the fact that no roads lead back to what came before — to the innocence of childhood or the first time we fell in love.

There is no road back to the scent of the Julys when I was young and leapt from a boulder into the ice-cold meltwater of a Norwegian fjord. No road back to when I stood, 17 years old with 10 francs in my pocket, by the harbor in Cannes, France, and watched two grown men in idiotic white uniforms row a woman and her poodle ashore from a yacht. I realized then for the first time that the egalitarian society I came from was the exception and not the rule. No road back to the first time I looked, wide-eyed, at the guards with automatic weapons surrounding another country’s parliament building — a sight that made me shake my head with a mixture of resignation and self-satisfaction, thinking, we don’t need that sort of thing where I come from.

For many years, it seemed as if nothing changed in Norway. You could leave the country for three months, travel the world, through coups d’état, assassinations, famines, massacres and tsunamis, and come home to find that the only new thing in the newspapers was the crossword puzzle. It was a country where everyone’s material needs were provided for. Political consensus was overwhelming, the debates focused primarily on how to achieve the goals that everyone had already agreed on. Ideological disagreements arose only when the reality of the rest of the world began to encroach, when a nation that until the 1970s had consisted largely of people of the same ethnic and cultural background had to decide whether its new citizens should be allowed to wear the hijab and build mosques.

Still, until Friday, we thought of our country as a virgin — unsullied by the ills of society. An exaggeration, of course. And yet.

In June I was bicycling with the Norwegian prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, and a mutual friend through Oslo, setting out for a hike on a forested mountain slope in this big yet little city. Two bodyguards followed us, also on bicycles. As we stopped at an intersection for a red light, a car drove up beside the prime minister. The driver called out through the open window: “Jens! There’s a little boy here who thinks it would be cool to say hello to you.”

The prime minister smiled and shook hands with the little boy in the passenger seat. “Hi, I’m Jens.”

The prime minister wearing his bike helmet; the boy wearing his seat belt; both of them stopped for a red light. The bodyguards had stopped a discreet distance behind. Smiling. It’s an image of safety and mutual trust. Of the ordinary, idyllic society that we all took for granted. How could anything go wrong? We had bike helmets and seat belts, and we were obeying the traffic rules.

Of course something could go wrong. Something can always go wrong.

On Monday night, more than 100,000 citizens gathered in the streets to mourn the victims of the attack. The image was striking. In Norway, “keeping a cool head” is a national virtue, but “keeping a warm heart” is not. Even for those of us who have an automatic aversion to national self-glorification, flags, grandiose words and large and expressive crowds, it makes an indelible impression when people demonstrate that they do mean something, these ideas and values of the society we have inherited and more or less take for granted. The gathering said that Norwegians refuse to let anyone take away our sense of security and trust. That we refuse to lose this battle against fear.

And yet there is no road back to the way it was before.

Yesterday, on the train, I heard a man shouting in fury. Before Friday, my automatic response would have been to turn around, maybe even move a little closer. After all, this could be an interesting disagreement that might entice me to take one side or the other. But now my automatic reaction was to look at my 11-year-old daughter to see whether she was safe, to look for an escape route in case the man was dangerous. I would like to believe that this new response will become tempered over time. But I already know that it will never disappear entirely.

After the bomb went off — an explosion I felt in my home over a mile away — and reports of the shootings out on the island of Utoya began to come in, I asked my daughter whether she was scared. She replied by quoting something I had once said to her: “Yes, but if you’re not scared, you can’t be brave.”

So if there is no road back to how things used to be, to the naïve fearlessness of what was untouched, there is a road forward. To be brave. To keep on as before. To turn the other cheek as we ask: “Is that all you’ve got?” To refuse to let fear change the way we build our society.

Jo Nesbo is the author of the novel “The Snowman.” This article was translated from the Norwegian by Tiina Nunnally.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on July 27, 2011, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: The Past Is a Foreign Country.

We’ve already just survived another such millenarian scare with the passing of May 21, 2011, when many were prophesying the coming of the Last Days. This was a specific prophecy I hadn’t heard of until just a couple of days before the apocalypse was supposed to occur. Talk about being out of the loop! But then I don’t pay much heed to apocalyptic prophecies. My inner mentor John used to say that prophecies focused your attention on a particular date or a specific event, leaving you oblivious to other potentially more important or challenging events that then blindside you.

This year is already a case in point. A great deal of attention in the form of books, videos, movies, articles, websites and the like has gone into focusing on 2012 as a year of catastrophes, but as far as natural disasters go, already we’ve had an earthquake and tsunami in Japan of historic proportions which brought on a nuclear emergency; and in the United States, an historic outbreak of tornadoes in the American Southeast, historic levels of snow and rain, and massive flooding of the Mississippi. Plus in the political and social arena, there’s been the historic (note how I need to keep using this word to describe the unprecedented nature of the events occurring around us) rise of the “Arab Spring” and the accompanying unrest and regime changes going on in the Middle East.

In all the buildup towards 2012, I don’t remember any psychic or prophet saying anything about 2011. This year got overlooked, and yet look around! It’s hardly an ordinary year, and it’s not even half over.

Back in the sixties when I lived in California, there was a new prophecy every year that the San Andreas fault would split with a great earthquake, and the western half of the State would slide into the Pacific. These prophecies were usually very specific, giving a day and a time when this would occur. When the time came nothing happened. Within a few weeks, a new psychic would emerge with yet another prophecy giving a new date and time for the following year, and the fever of expectation and speculation would begin all over again.

Such prophecies invariably come with lurid images of disaster and destruction; there’s a long history of this in Western culture. Usually, the scenario is that a special group will be saved (which almost always includes the one making the prophecy) while everyone else will either die or go through a period of tribulation and suffering. For evangelicals, the true believers will be raptured into heaven while the sinners go through hell on earth and then just hell. For many in the New Age and metaphysical movements of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, those who had the “right vibrations” would be taken up by friendly flying saucers while the rest of the earth was “cleansed” (i.e. those without the “right vibrations” being killed off by disasters and earth changes). Same scenario though with different modes of being saved and different winners, but in either case, most of humanity loses.

I call this “apocalypse porn.” It can be addictive, and it reduces people to victims in a planetary disaster movie. It is disempowering because it suggests that change cannot come through human effort and transformation or through joy and creativity but only through disaster and suffering.

There is a lighter version (“soft-core apocalypse porn”) in which the earth or civilization are not wholly destroyed but there are still enough disasters and catastrophes to bring about a change of consciousness in people that in turn will lead to building a bright, new world. But if you think about it, this is a highly inefficient and uncertain mode of transformation. How often do abuse and violence (and that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about apocalypse as a mode of human evolution and growth) lead to inner transformation and an expanded, more holistic consciousness? They are more likely to instill post traumatic stress syndrome and a constriction of consciousness as fear and the memory of pain settle in to the body.

When I asked John once about apocalypse, he said, “Humanity is not going to get out of doing the hard work of changing itself and creating the world you want. If you’ve created a mess in the world, you’re going to have to learn to clean it up yourselves.”

Once I met a famous psychic on the day after the day when she had predicted apocalypse would come. She wasn’t embarrassed by being wrong, she was livid, directing her anger at God, the universe, and everyone. “I hate this world,” she said. “I hate it! It has to be destroyed. I want it destroyed! Why wasn’t it destroyed? God has betrayed me!”

There are many things wrong with apocalypse porn as an attitude towards life, the world, humanity and the future. It gives the hope of escape, of change without the hard work of mindfully changing. It can delight in the drama of disaster. It is divisive and exclusive. It expresses the desire of one group of people that another group be destroyed. It glorifies death as a solution. In this it is no different in spirit from a person saying “I’m having problems with my neighbor, so I think I’ll go kill him.” Pulling a trigger is so much easier and simpler than sitting down with that neighbor and negotiating to work out the problems between you.

Apocalypse porn excites the imagination in one way but in another it deadens it. Thus, it creates closure. Apocalyptic prophecies talk about the end of the world, not the beginning, even though the word apocalypse itself comes from a root word meaning “revelation.”

In the Old Testament, Jonah prophesizes doom and destruction to the people of Nineveh unless they change their ways; then, sure that they won’t, he goes out a safe distance into the surrounding desert to watch God blast the city into nothingness. At that point, he is fully into apocalypse porn. But nothing happens. No fireworks, no earthquakes, no floods, no fires, no plagues, no meteor plunging in from outer space. The people have in fact repented and changed, which was the objective. Jonah had been thinking closure, but God, as always, was thinking opening.

We could say that the problem with Nineveh is that the people’s wanton, wasteful actions were creating closure, and God wanted them to stop and through love open themselves again to wider, richer, healthier, more creative possibilities.The prophecy really was if you keep on this way, you are going to close yourself into oblivion. What God wanted, though, wasn’t destruction but birth.This is true for the Mayan calendar and the 2012 prophecies. The individuals with whom I have discussed this who are scholars of Mayan culture and history tell me that for the Mayans themselves, December 21st of next year isn’t an ending but a beginning, the start of a new Long Count. And beginnings, like our celebration of New Year’s Day, always bring new possibilities. Again, not closure but openings.

I make a distinction between a prophecy and a prediction. Though both attempt to foretell the future, the former is a sentence while the latter is a recitation of observable facts. There is a world of difference between saying “If you keep smoking, you will damage your lungs,” which is a proven medical fact, and saying, “If you keep smoking, you are doomed!”

Predictions can be based on logical assumptions. They can be as simple as “if I build along earthquake fault lines, there is a high probability that eventually my buildings will fall down; if I build in a flood plain, there is a reasonable probability that my house will be washed away.” We are engaging in behaviors in our society that are far from balanced, healthy, loving, compassionate, and wise. Consequences will arise and are arising from this. But it doesn’t mean that we’re doomed and have no future. A statement about human stupidity implies difficult and unpleasant consequences ahead but it is not a statement of closure. We can re-imagine ourselves. We can change. We can do things differently. We can learn. We can grow. These are the options that apocalypse porn obscures or even denies.

There is another side to this coin, though. In September of 1962, when I was seventeen, I started college at Arizona State University. For at least a couple of years before this, but increasingly so in the first months of that year, there had been a growing number of psychically-received prophecies that a nuclear war was about to break out between the United States and the Soviet Union. A month later, it was revealed that Soviet missiles had been discovered in Cuba, and the Cuban Missile Crisis began. As was later shown when top secret documents from that time were revealed, we apparently did come within minutes of a nuclear holocaust. Civilization didn’t end that October in nuclear fires; the prophecies were incorrect. But psychics were definitely tuning into a possibility.

Delmore Schwartz, an American poet, said “Even paranoids have real enemies.” Prophecies, though they may be wrong in their specifics, may still be evidence that something important is going on and that we need to pay attention. May 21, 2011, definitely was not the end of the world, and December 21, 2012, will not be either. But they join a growing collection of impressions, prophecies, dreams, visions, and intuitions from literally hundreds of thousands of people around the world that humanity is on the brink of world-transforming change. The importance of this does not lie in the details of each individual impression or prophecy; almost certainly most if not all of them will be mistaken or wrong in their specifics. But taken together, they represent a powerful collective intuition that we as a species have reached a turning point (or tipping point) of some nature. It’s more than time that we paid attention.

True prophecy always holds out hope. This is because the function of prophecy really isn’t to foretell the future; it’s to inspire awareness and change in the present. It is, as I said, about opening, not about closure.

Apocalypse porn is not true prophecy. It inspires fear, and fear is notorious for creating boundaries, constrictions, and a narrowing of imagination, creativity and possibilities. We are at a time, I believe, when we cannot afford to be narrowed. If all the prophecies are right in essence, if not in specifics—and I believe that they are—then we need to reach out to each other across our boundaries to enhance communication and co-creativity. We need each other, not simply to survive but to think together, to feel together, to intuit together, to co-create together. We need to be expansive and collaborative with each other and with the world itself. For if the prophecies are correct in essence, and again I believe they are, then we are in the presence of immense possibilities and opportunities which can best be realized if we act together with love, compassion, and mutual respect.

At their best, prophecies—and prophets—reflect who we are in the moment and help us be in touch, as Lincoln put it, with the angels of our better nature so that we can engage the world and the future with wisdom, courage and vision. Apocalypse porn does none of that. It is simply a loss of faith in the human enterprise, a coward’s vision of a world grown too frightening to engage and a wish for the death that will provide escape.

It was this phrase, “walking on this Earth” that caught my attention. I was suddenly struck with the power and privilege involved in “walking on this Earth” and the richness that human beings bring to the world as they do so. The President’s statement, as it reverberated through my own mind, triggered thoughts that went far beyond the idea of death and focused instead on the potentialities of life. . .

. . . I’d been thinking about this throughout the week since. When President Obama said what he did about “walking the Earth,” my mind went to a whole other context than that of Osama bin Laden and his death. The question popped into my thoughts, “But who will we see walking on this Earth?” And the answer was, we see each of us. We are all continuing to walk this Earth.

This may seem too obvious to be worth a passing thought. But in addition, I had this image of someone walking the earth, and each time this person’s feet hit the ground sparks were generated. In my mind, “walking the Earth” was not simply a metaphor for being alive but became an image of power, a power generated by movement and engagement. In the curious ways that thoughts have of forming and associating with each other, I felt in that moment that it wasn’t enough just to “stand” on the earth, that is, simply to be here. One has to “walk” on the earth, extending one’s self into the life of this world.

Osama bin Laden extended himself into the life of the world in violent ways. In this he was unfortunately not alone, and I’m not just thinking of his fellow terrorists. We all have, on occasion, walked the earth with feet of anger and intolerance, fear and hate. Such footsteps raise clouds of distrust and violence around us. At the same time, all of us on occasion have also walked with feet of love and kindness, setting off sparks of goodwill and blessing.

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People haven’t fully grasped how terrifyingly powerful Friday’s earthquake was. Imagine a force that is 8,000 times stronger than the New Zealand quake, a force so great that it pushed Japan’s landmass eight feet closer to America, a force that even shook the planet, shifting the earth’s axis by four inches! Yet, in Tokyo, the city of skyscrapers, not one building fell.

Two years in Tokyo makes one rather casual about earthquakes. Mild ones strike every week, some so weak, you don’t notice them, others with a slight shake that last 10 to 20 seconds. When the March 11 earthquake struck, my initial reaction was “oh well, another earthquake”. But suddenly things turned ominous. The shaking became intense. The floor began moving so much that standing upright became difficult. Our two-storied residence was rattling and shaking as if a giant wicked witch was shaking the earth as if it were a child’s rattle. I was absolutely sure the roof would come clattering down. And what was scary was that the earthquake was going on and on. It just wasn’t stopping. There was the deafening sound of the tectonic plates crashing below one’s feet. The shaking, rumbling and heaving must have gone on for at least two minutes before I realized- “Oh my God, this is the biggie”. When we moved to Tokyo, our Japanese friends had told us: “You are brave to come now. The giant earthquake is 70 years overdue!”

When the shaking finally stopped, I rushed to our terrace to see if the 60 storied building about a kilometer away still stood. I was 100 per cent sure that it would have disappeared from our skyline. I was certain every tall building nearby would have been reduced to a heap of rubble on the ground by this mother of an earthquake. I stared in disbelief. There the Mori Tower stood, the giant, glass-sheathed monster of a building, looking as it always did – a sensational spaceship that had parked itself in our midst. I looked around. Not one window pane in any of the buildings nearby had even cracked! I looked at myself. Not a scratch. I looked at our well-stocked library – not one book had fallen.

I was humbled by human brilliance. Imagine the ingenuity of Japanese earthquake proof technology that had withstood an earthquake that even shook the planet! Japanese technology is expensive, but worth every penny – it makes the difference between life and death.

As I knew this earthquake would be headline news on all TV channels in a matter of minutes, I called my loved ones in Norway, Australia and India to say we had survived a powerful earthquake. Just as well I did. Within half an hour, mobiles and landlines jammed as a stunned world watched an epic tragedy unfold. But amazingly, throughout this ordeal, the internet worked flawlessly. I was able to send and receive emails, make and receive phone calls on Skype. Again, I marveled the genius of technology created by man.

But that quickly changed as I watched in horror television footage of a tsunami caught live. I have never ever been more stunned by anything I have seen in my entire life. The earthquake had struck a meager 130 km from the coast of Japan. So within minutes, a 10 meter high tsunami tore into Japan’s northeast coast at the speed of a jumbo jet, uprooting, crushing, wrecking and tossing around everything that stood in its path – ships, cars, trucks, farmlands, houses, even factories. TV anchors were saying the death toll in the earthquake was about 3 dead. And I was silently screaming at them; “What rubbish are you saying? Are you not watching your own footage of this tsunami? Whole villages have been swept away by this destructive tsunami. This is thousands, maybe tens of thousands people, perishing before our eyes!”

I was humbled by the petrifying power of nature. I have never seen such force before and I hope I never will. The overwhelming feeling I had while watching the tsunami as it crashed in was how utterly powerless we humans are. How pathetic our arrogance. How shallow our ambitions. How utterly silly our material possessions. Nature tossed cars, boats, houses like worthless toys. Possessions that humans obsessed over, slaved a whole lifetime to accumulate, which they envied and yearned to own. Broken, twisted, mangled and cast aside like scrap. In a matter of minutes, prosperous towns and villages reduced to a junkyard.

As I watched the destruction, I couldn’t help but thinking that humankind would be better off returning to their Shinto (Japan’s animist religion), Hindu and pagan roots. We need to resurrect our reverence for nature enshrined in these old religions, but now forgotten in our mindless quest to plunder the planet for our greed and selfish cravings. The emptiness, worthlessness and transience of our new religion – materialism – were all too evident.

Friday March 11, 2.46 is a moment that all of us who were in Tokyo and the other affected areas and who are alive to tell our tales will remember for the rest of our lives. It is like the moment JFK was assassinated or 9/11 happened, remaining etched in our memories forever. This was like all of the world’s worst catastrophes combined together: measuring 9 on the Richter scale, the earthquake was among one of the worst to hit the world, followed by a terrifying tsunami and a rapidly escalating nuclear emergency that seems on the brink of spinning out of control. It is like catastrophic events from Noah’s Great Flood to 9/11, all combined at one time in one place!

Over the past two years I have come to admire many Japanese traits – carefulness, diligence, mindfulness, politeness, caring, honesty, safety standards, punctuality, cleanliness and social ethic. When the earthquake struck, my Japanese friend was trapped on the 37th floor of a skyscraper that was swaying like palm tree. Truly scary! The elevators shut down automatically and all the Japanese walked down the stairs in a calm and orderly fashion. In most other countries, if the earthquake had not killed people, the stampede would have!

I also have to marvel Japan’s disaster preparedness. Japanese authorities conduct regular emergency drills, bring earthquake simulators so we can physically experience the rattling of a size 7 earthquake, and instruct residents to stock plenty of food, medicines and water and expect electricity and water supply to stall for three days. But in Tokyo there has been no disruption. At home we have stocks of everything for a couple of weeks. We have Iodine tablets, masks and anti-radiation suits should a nuclear meltdown and blowout happen. We are now in unchartered nuclear territory, so we really cannot speculate what the outcome will be. The nuclear crisis is very serious, but knowledgeable experts say, it is not apocalyptic. My heart goes out to the heroic technicians battling in the nuclear plant and the people killed and shattered by the deadly tsunami. It would be a greater tragedy if the world forgets the plight of these brave employees who could die or be permanently impaired and the freezing, hungry and yet uncomplaining tsunami survivors whose lives have been ruined forever.

Seven tough days have gone by. But the end is not in sight yet. The aftershocks continue. The nuclear radiation fears intensify. TV channels do what they seem very good at – confuse viewers and aggravate panic. Many foreigners are leaving. I am staying on because I believe my place is beside my husband. And in the streets of Tokyo, the Japanese go about their daily lives, tense, but with their fabled calm and civility intact.

http://www.anitapratap.com

BOSTON — Halfway around the world from Tahrir Square in Cairo, an aging American intellectual shuffles about his cluttered brick row house in a working-class neighborhood here. His name is Gene Sharp. Stoop-shouldered and white-haired at 83, he grows orchids, has yet to master the Internet and hardly seems like a dangerous man.
Evan McGlinn for The New York Times

Gene Sharp, 83, is known for writing about nonviolence.
Related: Unrest Spreads, Some Violently, in Middle East (February 17, 2011)
Secret Report Ordered by Obama Identified Potential Uprisings (February 17, 2011)
Bahrain Turmoil Poses Fresh Test for White House (February 18, 2011)
Protests Take Aim at Leader of Libya (February 17, 2011)
Police Fire on Protesters in Iraq (February 17, 2011)
Freed by Egypt’s Revolt, Workers Press Demands (February 17, 2011)

But for the world’s despots, his ideas can be fatal. Few Americans have heard of Mr. Sharp. But for decades, his practical writings on nonviolent revolution — most notably “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, available for download in 24 languages — have inspired dissidents around the world, including in Burma, Bosnia, Estonia and Zimbabwe, and now Tunisia and Egypt.

When Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement was struggling to recover from a failed effort in 2005, its leaders tossed around “crazy ideas” about bringing down the government, said Ahmed Maher, a leading strategist. They stumbled on Mr. Sharp while examining the Serbian movement Otpor, which he had influenced.

When the nonpartisan International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, which trains democracy activists, slipped into Cairo several years ago to conduct a workshop, among the papers it distributed was Mr. Sharp’s “198 Methods of Nonviolent Action,” a list of tactics that range from hunger strikes to “protest disrobing” to “disclosing identities of secret agents.”
Dalia Ziada, an Egyptian blogger and activist who attended the workshop and later organized similar sessions on her own, said trainees were active in both the Tunisia and Egypt revolts. She said that some activists translated excerpts of Mr. Sharp’s work into Arabic, and that his message of “attacking weaknesses of dictators” stuck with them.
Peter Ackerman, a onetime student of Mr. Sharp who founded the nonviolence center and ran the Cairo workshop, cites his former mentor as proof that “ideas have power.”

Mr. Sharp, hard-nosed yet exceedingly shy, is careful not to take credit. He is more thinker than revolutionary, though as a young man he participated in lunch-counter sit-ins and spent nine months in a federal prison in Danbury, Conn., as a conscientious objector during the Korean War. He has had no contact with the Egyptian protesters, he said, although he recently learned that the Muslim Brotherhood had “From Dictatorship to Democracy” posted on its Web site.

While seeing the revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak as a sign of “encouragement,” Mr. Sharp said, “The people of Egypt did that — not me.”

He has been watching events in Cairo unfold on CNN from his modest house in East Boston, which he bought in 1968 for $150 plus back taxes. It doubles as the headquarters of the Albert Einstein Institution, an organization Mr. Sharp founded in 1983 while running seminars at Harvard and teaching political science at what is now the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. It consists of him; his assistant, Jamila Raqib, whose family fled Soviet oppression in Afghanistan when she was 5; a part-time office manager and a Golden Retriever mix named Sally. Their office wall sports a bumper sticker that reads “Gotov Je!” — Serbian for “He is finished!”

In this era of Twitter revolutionaries, the Internet holds little allure for Mr. Sharp. He is not on Facebook and does not venture onto the Einstein Web site. (“I should,” he said apologetically.) If he must send e-mail, he consults a handwritten note Ms. Raqib has taped to the doorjamb near his state-of-the-art Macintosh computer in a study overflowing with books and papers. “To open a blank e-mail,” it reads, “click once on icon that says ‘new’ at top of window.”

Some people suspect Mr. Sharp of being a closet peacenik and a lefty — in the 1950s, he wrote for a publication called “Peace News” and he once worked as personal secretary to A. J. Muste, a noted labor union activist and pacifist — but he insists that he outgrew his own early pacifism and describes himself as “trans-partisan.”

Based on studies of revolutionaries like Gandhi, nonviolent uprisings, civil rights struggles, economic boycotts and the like, he has concluded that advancing freedom takes careful strategy and meticulous planning, advice that Ms. Ziada said resonated among youth leaders in Egypt. Peaceful protest is best, he says — not for any moral reason, but because violence provokes autocrats to crack down. “If you fight with violence,” Mr. Sharp said, “you are fighting with your enemy’s best weapon, and you may be a brave but dead hero.”

Autocrats abhor Mr. Sharp. In 2007, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela denounced him, and officials in Myanmar, according to diplomatic cables obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, accused him of being part of a conspiracy to set off demonstrations intended “to bring down the government.” (A year earlier, a cable from the United States Embassy in Damascus noted that Syrian dissidents had trained in nonviolence by reading Mr. Sharp’s writings.)

In 2008, Iran featured Mr. Sharp, along with Senator John McCain of Arizona and the Democratic financier George Soros, in an animated propaganda video that accused Mr. Sharp of being the C.I.A. agent “in charge of America’s infiltration into other countries,” an assertion his fellow scholars find ludicrous.

“He is generally considered the father of the whole field of the study of strategic nonviolent action,” said Stephen Zunes, an expert in that field at the University of San Francisco. “Some of these exaggerated stories of him going around the world and starting revolutions and leading mobs, what a joke. He’s much more into doing the research and the theoretical work than he is in disseminating it.”

That is not to say Mr. Sharp has not seen any action. In 1989, he flew to China to witness the uprising in Tiananmen Square. In the early 1990s, he sneaked into a rebel camp in Myanmar at the invitation of Robert L. Helvey, a retired Army colonel who advised the opposition there. They met when Colonel Helvey was on a fellowship at Harvard; the military man thought the professor had ideas that could avoid war. “Here we were in this jungle, reading Gene Sharp’s work by candlelight,” Colonel Helvey recalled. “This guy has tremendous insight into society and the dynamics of social power.”

Not everyone is so impressed. As’ad AbuKhalil, a Lebanese political scientist and founder of the Angry Arab News Service blog, was outraged by a passing mention of Mr. Sharp in The New York Times on Monday. He complained that Western journalists were looking for a “Lawrence of Arabia” to explain Egyptians’ success, in a colonialist attempt to deny credit to Egyptians. Still, just as Mr. Sharp’s profile seems to be expanding, his institute is contracting.

Mr. Ackerman, who became wealthy as an investment banker after studying under Mr. Sharp, contributed millions of dollars and kept it afloat for years. But about a decade ago, Mr. Ackerman wanted to disseminate Mr. Sharp’s ideas more aggressively, as well as his own. He put his money into his own center, which also produces movies and even a video game to train dissidents. An annuity he purchased still helps pay Mr. Sharp’s salary.
In the twilight of his career, Mr. Sharp, who never married, is slowing down. His voice trembles and his blue eyes grow watery when he is tired; he gave up driving after a recent accident. He does his own grocery shopping; his assistant, Ms. Raqib, tries to follow him when it is icy. He does not like it.

He says his work is far from done. He has just submitted a manuscript for a new book, “Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Terminology of Civil Resistance in Conflicts,” to be published this fall by Oxford University Press. He would like readers to know he did not pick the title. “It’s a little immodest,” he said. He has another manuscript in the works about Einstein, whose own concerns about totalitarianism prompted Mr. Sharp to adopt the scientist’s name for his institution. (Einstein wrote the foreword to Mr. Sharp’s first book, about Gandhi.)

In the meantime, he is keeping a close eye on the Middle East. He was struck by the Egyptian protesters’ discipline in remaining peaceful, and especially by their lack of fear. “That is straight out of Gandhi,” Mr. Sharp said. “If people are not afraid of the dictatorship, that dictatorship is in big trouble.”

Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting from New York, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo.

For those of you hungry for more facts, figures and predictions stop reading now. For those of you who dismiss all such information completely – you might as well stop reading as well! However, maybe some of you are like me, willing to suspend belief and disbelief for a while – to check out within yourselves what these predictions, and the belief systems surrounding them, mean for you. So, if you can handle yet another person’s perspective on all this – read on.

It seems to me that I have some choices here:
a) I can believe totally, take all possible precautions and live the rest of my life in fear and tension – waiting for ‘the big one’.
b) I can take no notice at all, live for the moment, go to sleep and hope everything will turn out OK.
c) Or, I can refuse to accept or deny – blindly.

It’s pretty obvious that if you have a choice, and you nearly always do, it would probably be unwise to live on the San Andreas fault, or at the foot of an active volcano or in areas subject to severe flooding – this is just common sense. Given the growing state of pollution, the country air is preferable to the city – it is also easier to be reasonably self sufficient there.

To me, all the above are speculative, what am I sure of? What do I know? My own inner voice is the only one that is constant and I have to trust that. I know that the quality of my life is more important to me than the length. I do not wish to live in fear or great inconvenience. I do not want to barricade myself in some remote place on this planet, waiting for catastrophes to happen. So far my life has been a wondrous dance of movement, stillness and a combination of both. Following a thread if you like and that thread has never led me into disaster – only into growth and more contentment.

At my age (77), I don’t have the energy any more for great causes or drastic action. Sort of been there, done that. However, I do have a compassionate heart and strongly feel the tsunamis of tragedy that appear to engulf other human beings around the world. I can find no rhyme nor reason for them happening, but I can write. So, that is what I do.

Predictions and premonitions are often disaster based – the scenarios painted can only come from the perspective of the past transferred into the future. How can ANYONE predict a future as yet not experienced by the human race. Almost any message, any prediction has to come through a human form, inevitably coloured by the history and memory of that particular human form.

There is also a danger, particularly now, of riding on the disaster bandwagon, of feeding on the excitement of danger, the drama of catastrophe. We are fed this as a daily diet through the media anyway; we are programmed to accept this as ‘normal’. One of the idiosyncrasies of the human race is its preference for drama and dire consequences.

I too feed, to a certain extent, on the news bulletins, with their stories of impossible situations, venal and mad dictators, tragedies caused not only by humans, but by Nature as well (although of course that is a moot point – which comes first, the chicken or the egg?) Of course I could turn off the radio or the TV, refuse to read any newspapers or even discuss these things with my friends.

I prefer to see the disastrous predictions as a wake up call. A call for all of us to start seeing each other – whatever our colour, race or gender – simply as human beings. If you allow yourself to look deeply into another’s eyes – to see the sameness that is there rather than the difference, how can there be hate?

It appears to me that, as a species, we are being pushed to the end of our endurance and tolerance of the status quo, of war, greed and corruption. In the past, and currently, these negative qualities have often been met by more of the same.

That obviously has not worked. It seems to me that something new is being called for, an opportunity to change ourselves, and the way we view ourselves and others with whom we share this planet. The problem is that it has never been done before – ever. There are no guidelines, no rule books, no ‘how to’ plans. Various religions have tried, but often succeeded only in creating more mayhem.

Systems are changing, if they don’t they will collapse, change is ruthless and will happen without us or, with enough global awareness, with us. Science is moving at a breathtaking pace, always willing to move into what isn’t known yet.

Will politics, economics, education and the war machines do the same? These systems are made up of individuals like you or me. You would not be reading this letter if your awareness was not already on reasonably high alert!

Instead of dwelling on all the earth shattering things that might happen – how about an inventory of the hopeful things that already have happened; such as the falling of the Berlin wall, patient efforts in the Middle east, voices from controlled countries like China finding a way to be heard, the growing protection of wildlife and efforts to repair ecological damage around the world. All these have been started and carried out by individuals like you and me.

It seems to me that new movements of global awareness are also building a groundswell that will eventually find its way – is already finding its way – to the politicians, the business men and the power brokers.

The plethora of quality movies with messages all can understand, the growing popularity of opera and interest in all the arts, is a sign that our souls are aching for quality of life, for sensitivity and understanding. There is a recognition that it is time to stand up and be counted – truthfully – whatever the consequences.

This has to start on a day to day level with each of us, with me. My new love has this quote at the end of all his emails, by Anais Nin: “We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.” If we really took that on board, if we understood the basic principles of mirroring (ie that whatever we see in another has, at the very least, a reference point within us.) – then real change could happen. While we only look out from our own self-absorbed myopia, we are only going to see what we expect to see – that with which we are familiar.

I do not know if the disastrous prophecies will come true. I do know that I don’t intend to live my life as though they will. I will live the rest of my life as fully as I have lived it up ‘till today. I trust that if I am meant to stay here for a while I will be given choices. I have always been given choices. I cannot choose wisely if my mind is full of what might happen, I can only choose wisely, if I am awake enough to be in what is happening, staying as present as possible to the signals that are there all the time.

Should I be swallowed by an earthquake, there is not much I can do about it. However, my awareness is something I can attend to every day, just as I eat, work, play or sleep. That is the game I like. I would rather play that game than one of physical disaster – it would be pretty silly not to wouldn’t it?

My mind wanders to my three grandsons, what sort of world will they inherit? My certain hope is that they will make a better job of it than we have. I hope they will have the intelligence and energy to see the futility of war and become kinder and more tolerant adults. This is not an impossible dream, given the increasing inter-racial nature of education these days.

When I started this article I had no idea what I would write – I just waited and wrote down what was there. My initial feeling was genuinely “so what?” – so what if the predictions have been coming down to us for centuries, so what if I am in imminent danger of being overwhelmed by a tidal wave (the most likely catastrophe to affect me given where I live, ten minutes walk from the sea!).

If I die, I die and if I live I live. I don’t know much, if anything, about dying, I don’t remember dying before – I do know about living. If my writing can catch someone’s attention, suggest to them that they look at the quality of their life and that of those around them – so be it. I can only do what I can do. After a life time of ‘doing’ I don’t want or need to ‘do’ in the same way.

Each day for me is a wondrous thing – time to listen, to watch, to engage. If this were taken away from me by a tidal wave – so what? While I am alive on this planet, if I live as truly and as fully as possible, then I won’t have wasted my time.

This is quite a responsibility. It is also the merest flicker of time in the infinity in which I exist, and I, according to the latest scientific discoveries – am only space – so what?

Sometimes a food is best tasted alone. It is worth waiting through the year to taste that first strawberry. It needs no cream, no meringue, or any other thing we drown the flavour of the fruit in. Anyone who has grown peas knows that the first pod picked goes into your mouth, not the kitchen. The moment has to be tasted there and then, savoured, enjoyed and exulted in. And even when cooked, some foods need no additions, no seasoning, no accompaniments, just its own perfection.

The same can be said of a sky full of the cries of migrating geese, or seeing the first bluebell or standing on a hill when, just for one perfect moment, the whole world becomes still. The very fact that the delight lasts for only a breath or two is what makes those moments precious. For that instant you are in touch with the wonder of creation, the miracle of divine imagination, the amazing never-ending richness of it all. For that instant your spirit is enlarged and the memory of it can provide little guiding lights on dark days. But that taste, that instant alone cannot feed your body or your spirit. For that you need a kitchen, and pots and pans, ingredients and recipes. Both physically and spiritually, you have to put food on your plate.

Good recipes require the right ingredients. Not all sweet flavours go together, and too much sweetness is cloying. Many savoury flavours positively hate each other and fight to get your attention. Put too much into any recipe and your body and your spirit will reject it, walk away from the plate. Trying to cram all your favourite foods into one meal or all your favourite activities into one day never works; it only leads to disappointment. One has, in all things, to pick and choose with care, and with cooking like this the plate should never be crowded. One learns to be satisfied with just enough. In the same way I have learnt that a day spent with a few good friends is more enriching than an evening spent at a crowded party. Sitting quietly can be far more enlightening than the meditation pose, the candles, the music, the incense, and whatever else the restless spirit thinks it needs to get in touch with itself. So one picks one’s ingredients with care, and with care creates beautiful dishes.

But, just as you can’t really wear haute couture clothes to do the gardening in, so your body and your spirit would find it difficult to live on nothing but nouvelle cuisine. Nor, if you are poor, can you afford fancy ingredients or the kitchen equipment needed to cook them with. You cannot afford to go to retreats and workshops run by spiritual masters to constantly feed your soul. You have to make do with what you have. And that, as any good cook knows, is where the stewpot comes in. The French call it a ‘marmite’, and it always sits on the kitchen range or hangs over the fire. It is never emptied but added to, day by day. What goes in is simply what you have available, and it adds to the flavour, becomes part of the whole. In a sense, it contains everything your body or your spirit might need. It not only nourishes you, it sustains you through all the dark winter days when you most need to keep body and soul together.

It seems to me that the wise cook learns to know when life needs the single burst of plum juice in the mouth or the rainbow in the sky; when it needs carefully chosen ingredients that complement each other like a day shared walking on the moors with a friend or two; and when it needs to be filled from the stewpot of one’s own daily living, when every ingredient, the pains and the pleasures, the gains and the losses, the laughter and the tears, the days and the years have all blended into a seamless, nourishing, sustaining meal; a meal that keeps you going, gives you the strength to get up in the morning and do what needs to be done. The fresh-picked fruit or the sunlight on the hill are nothing without the daily bread. And without that stewpot simmering away, we wouldn’t be here to experience the magic of life.

. . . . A Louisiana costal resident was driving down a road alongside the beach that is being hardest hit by oil at the moment. He was complaining about the lack of any clean-up crews on the beach and was venting his anger at BP. He had a large mustache that quivered with his indignation as he spoke, and his voice was rough and strained with his fury. Suddenly he stopped and jumped out of his truck. Running down along the beach with the news camera man right behind him, he suddenly stopped and plunged his hands into the oily sand. He then pulled up a bird small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. It was covered in oil, but it was still alive. “Oh, this poor bird,” he said, cradling it, his voice softening to one of caring and compassion. “This poor, poor creature.”

The news report ended at that point, so I don’t know what happened next, whether he was able to get the bird to one of the shelters where animals are being cleaned from the oil. And I have no idea how he had spotted this tiny bird from the road when a moment before he had been so focused on his rage. But in the twinkling of an eye, he went from shouting at the cameraman, his attention focused on BP and his anger at them, to someone perceiving the plight of another living creature and shifting his attention to doing what he could, revealing the depth of his caring. I found this very moving.

Over the next few months, I have no doubt there will be thousands of words written analyzing this event, assigning blame and expressing anger. This may well become the equivalent of an environmental 9/11 in terms of its impact on our society except that where the terrorist attack and the collapse of the World Trade Towers occurred in a two-hour span of time, the Gulf oil spill is a catastrophe unfolding over weeks and months, leaving us twisting in the wind with the uncertainty of how it will end. If as many fear, the storm surges and winds of the hurricanes expected this season carry the contamination of oil much further inland, including to populated areas and farming country, or if the oil enters the Gulf Stream and heads around to the beaches of America’s eastern coastland and then on to Europe, then the impact of this disaster will be much greater than it appears now and the ending may be years in the future.

If ever an event were worthy of our anger and sorrow, this is it. This is particularly true because this is no random act of nature like the earthquake that hit Haiti. It was an eminently preventable event. That it occurred comes as no surprise to many who have been predicting such a disaster for years, but it also comes as further indication of the deep structural flaws in our civilization, from our increasing dependence on resources that in fact are running out and are harder and harder to get, to the financial pressures and expectations that lead individuals and corporations to take shortcuts and neglect safety measures in order to save a dollar here and a dollar there. Yes, greed is involved, but it’s not just corporate greed. It’s our collective greed for a certain kind of lifestyle, a certain kind of dominance upon the earth, a certain kind of anthropocentric power to do with the world and its web of interconnected life what we wish, as we wish, when we wish. . . .

But if we are going to work effectively at a spiritual level through subtle activism with this event and its unfolding consequences, anger and sorrow must be set aside. Like the man in the news story who suddenly switched from expressing anger to taking action to help another living creature, we need to go beyond our anger and find our compassion and the presence of a healing light within us.

So, from my perspective at least, there is no single unified response of the inner worlds to this event. What this means to me is that I need to look to my own response. What do I feel? What do I think? And likewise, dear reader, what do you feel and think? For it’s out of our hearts and minds that we fashion our imaginative, mental, emotional, and spiritual responses, and our physical ones as well if we are in a position to take physical action. I don’t need a nature spirit to tell me it’s angry for me to feel anger myself or for me to feel compassion and sorrow and a need to do something to help.

Subtle activism is a way of offering help through the use of subtle energies of consciousness and life when we’re unable to help in more physical ways. It’s never a substitute for meaningful and appropriate physical action, but it can be an important complement. This is not the place to go into the whys and wherefores of subtle activism, its principles of operation and the theory of how it works; I have classes that do that if you are interested. What I would like to do here is just offer some specific inner responses you can make if you are inclined. However, there are two key ideas to keep in mind. The first is that all subtle activism is ultimately intended to create and foster wholeness. The subtle environment of the world is a place of important connections along which life energies flow, and when events like this occur, it’s these connections that get broken. The second is that inner work is done in a spirit of compassion, love and service. Wholeness is repaired or re-created through life-affirming energies, not through anger or blame, judgment or revenge. We must be like the man in the news interview, switching from our outrage to our compassion and reaching out to hold in our inner hands of love the life that has been impacted and that is threatened.

. . . .

You can help in this process by making available your own energies of compassion and wholeness to the situation through your loving attunement. You cannot do this in a state of anger or agitation, so don’t attempt this if your emotions about what is happening in the Gulf overwhelm you with sadness, anger, and so forth. Wait until you can find calm and peace within yourself. But when you do, then here is one way you can offer your help. Attune to a spiritual source of wholeness that is meaningful to you, that is, a source from which you would draw inspiration and presence to find wholeness in yourself. Draw that wholeness into you and merge it with your own calm presence, your own integration and sense of wholeness. In imagination and contemplation, project your presence into the affected areas of the Gulf where death and disruption are occurring to the life of the sea and the coastlines. Be a presence of wholeness and connection, as if you were a nerve cell connecting the spiritual worlds with the earth and water itself. In effect, you are offering your assistance and the energy of your presence to those beings who are seeking to “reknit” the subtle environment.

4: Be open to grief. Grief is part of the healing process of binding up broken subtle ties and connections. I’m not talking about wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. Grief can become mixed up with dramas of self-concern and victimization (the “poor me” syndrome), and you want to be clear of such dramas. You want to feel honestly the pain and sorrow involved with what is happening to the nature and the people of the Gulf. Grieving is part of the process of acknowledging the broken connections I spoke about earlier and thus of beginning a process of healing. Don’t be hesitant or resistant to grieving with the nature spirits and with the life of the Gulf that is being affected. You can share your own emotions of pain with them. At the same time, however, don’t assume or project that nature spirits feel that grief or pain in the same way; don’t anthropomorphize, in other words.

5: Eventually the Gulf will heal. Depending on the amount of damage that is done by the time this spill is cleaned up, that healing could take a long time, but it will happen. Harmony and balance will be restored, though it might look different than what is there now. . . .Here you want to gain the long view, the perspective of centuries and millennia. In attuning to the Gulf and the coastlines where death and damage are occurring, hold an image of these areas in their perfection when healing has taken place. See the area connected and whole. In other words, tune into the template of wholeness held by the vaster consciousnesses and hold the joy and beauty of that template; it forms a matrix around which healing can take place.

These are just some suggestions of things you can do, and they focus on the natural world. But the same suggestions, slightly modified, can be used to hold and bless the humans who are involved and who are being impacted. This goes for the engineers and others trying to repair this situation as much as for those whose livelihoods are being lost or whose health is being affected.

One important thing we can do is to hold the sorrow and grief of this event in our hearts without flinching. This takes courage because it’s a painful thing to do. And it takes wisdom and strength to hold that pain without being overwhelmed or constricted by it. Becoming despondent or despairing doesn’t help, but standing in solidarity with the people and creatures that are being affected and not turning away in denial can be very helpful. From an inner standpoint, it means our Light is available as needed.

No pun intended, but there is a gulf between where our society and our collective human consciousness are at the moment and where they need to be to fashion a world that is sustainable and that works for the benefit of all species of life. To write off this tragedy as “just another oil spill” and part of the price for doing “business as usual,” is to lose an opportunity to recognize the need to revision ourselves and our world and to move in a different, more holistic direction. If this tragedy has a deeper meaning, I believe it manifests in how we can seize this opportunity. (A new book that looks at how we can make this change in a most positive and creative way is Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, by Juliet B. Schor, an environmental economist; I highly recommend it.)

Many years ago a friend of mine was involved in drilling oil wells in Louisiana. One day he gave me a small bottle of crude oil brought up from a mile or so under the earth. I was interested to see that it had a reddish color, which made me think of the way many indigenous peoples refer to oil as the blood of the earth. In many spiritual traditions, the spilling of blood in sacrifice is considered transformative. Perhaps we might see this oil spill as Gaia spilling her blood to effect a transformation in our consciousnesses that we may learn to truly think like a planet and to care for the world that sustains us. If so, my prayer is that this sacrifice is not being made in vain.

. . . There is one theme that has been rattling around in my brain for a couple of weeks, one that I’d like to develop more fully in the months ahead, and that is the theme of participation and partnership.

Consider a small town in which everyone has a house and a garden and all the houses are clustered into small neighborhoods separated by hedges. People are aware that they are in a town but it serves more as a backdrop to their everyday lives than as a true community. Everyone is busy attending to their own affairs, their own gardens, and their own homes, with some attention left over for their immediate neighbors.

But then one day a discovery is made. There are underground wires running between all the houses and not just the ones in a particular neighborhood cluster either. The whole town seems to be interconnected in ways no one had suspected. Furthermore, these wires are attached to a peculiar instrument that had always been in the house but which had not seemed to do anything, so folks had just been ignoring it. Searching about, they found old dusty manuals that suggested that these devices, called “telephones,” could be used to talk over a distance across the hedges to people in other houses, even people in neighborhoods on the far side of town. Suddenly the sense of being part of a whole town became that much more real.

Unfortunately, they also discovered that many of the wires had been broken by the digging and plowing that people had been doing in their own fields and around their homes. If we really want to have a whole town, the people said to each other, we need to fix these connections so we can talk to each other. And this is what they did.

However, they discovered even this was not enough. Interconnected though they might be and although they were now communicating and aware of each other in new ways, they began to realize that to truly be a town they had to build it together. Communication by itself was not sufficient for community. A level of mutual participation, caring, and co-creativity was also required. For the town was more than just a collection of houses and neighborhoods; it was a collaborative creation, a shared consciousness and identity.

A few weeks ago I took part in the annual Lindisfarne Fellows gathering. The Lindisfarne Association is a gathering of scientists, economists, business people, contemplatives and mystics, artists, political activists, and educators all of whom are working at the cutting edge of cultural transformation. Since its founding in 1974, it has been at the forefront of work being done in a number of fields to foster and promote a worldview that is holistic, ecological, and based on the interaction of complex, dynamical systems. In the language of my parable, these are people who have been actively rediscovering the buried wiring between the houses and the neighborhoods and promoting the idea that we are all living in one interconnected town. Along with many other groups and individuals over the past forty years, they have helped make this idea commonplace in our society, even if its implications and potentials have not been fully understood or implemented yet.

Many of the Fellows are now in their late fifties, sixties or seventies, although new, younger people have been invited to join, and there is much talk about passing on the torch. The holistic worldview—or what Lindisfarne would call the “Gaian worldview”—while widely accepted is still not yet the foundation for decision-making in the halls of government and business, though the trend is in that direction. So there is much work still to be done. But the most important work from my point of view is not merely in establishing for good and all that we live in a holistic world in which all of life (all the neighborhoods) is interdependent and interconnected in profound and complex ways. Having established that we are, in fact, citizens of a township called Gaia or Earth, the next great task is to learn how to be participants, collaborators and co-creators with the other neighborhoods that make up this world and in the process fixing the connections that our human activities, particularly in recent years, have allowed to become broken.

For make no bones about it, we live in a broken world, though one that I feel can be repaired. The connections between parts of ourselves, between ourselves and others (particularly those different racially, ethnically, politically, economically, or culturally from ourselves), between ourselves and the kingdoms of nature, and between ourselves as physical beings and the subtle or non-physical realms of life and intelligence are nowhere near as healthy, whole, or vital as they could be. Much of this “wiring” has been buried and forgotten or outright broken, leaving us struggling within a fragmented—and fragmenting—consciousness of the world.

This to me is a huge issue, and it is not solved simply by accepting and believing in a holistic paradigm. It is solved by collaborative mind and action, a reaching out across our boundaries to create wholeness through, at the very least, the use of love, caring, and appreciation. It is also helped by developing an appreciation for the many ways in which we are connected and the nature of some of the “subtle” wiring that we’ve overlooked for decades in our technological and materialistic culture. That is a topic, Subtle Activism, which I want to explore in future David’s Desks.

I suppose my summer thought then is that as challenging as the work has been over the past five decades for thousands of people to articulate and foster a holistic, ecological worldview—a worldview that has yet to be fully accepted—the real work, the “town-building” work, is yet ahead of us. If the holistic paradigm has asked us to revision and redefine the nature of the world around us, the next step asks us to revision and redefine ourselves in co-creative and participatory relationship to that world. It means accepting levels of both surrender and openness on the one hand and power and capacity on the other with which we may feel uncomfortable and unfamiliar. It asks us to step up as partners to the world, learning to “think like a planet.”

For more information on David’s work and writing visit www.lorian.org