The EFSJ Paradigm against the MMDS Paradigm
Mediator: Arya B. Bhardwaj (Gandhi-in- Action)
Report: Ulla Klotz
The lives of all human beings was Gandhi's subject of politics. His teachers were a.o. social scientists, intellectuals and philosophers as George Fox, Ruskin, Karl Marx. Arya tried to define for us the paradigm, which is basic for creating peace for all mankind:
- E Enlightenment
- F Freedom
- SJ Social Justice
This is in opposition to today's dominant paradigm
- M Money
- M Market
- D Development
- S Material Success
At the beginning of our workshop Arya sang for us an old Vedic prayer. It asks 3 times for peace.
- Peace in myself
- Peace in my family with my neighbours, with people around me, who share my life
- Peace with Mother Nature.
These ‘3 peaces’ are inseparable, they can not be seen as isolated from each other, and short cuts are also not possible. But we have to ‘learn to see them’, visualizing them in us as a prior condition for peace. He describes a situation 17 years ago, when he visited East Berlin in 1985 and a friend from West Germany, accompanying him, said: You see, here is NOTHING.
He meant, that there were no cars, no visible business activity, which dominates the streets of the West, this was ‘NOTHING’ for him. Arya also described his observations as a doctor, stating, that people who gave an outside impression of looking really strong, were almost unable to undergo a ‘Pulse Diagnose’, following the Ayurvedic Medicine, without a nervous breakdown (starting to cry). He explained this phenomenon with the fact, that following the Paradigm MMDS, the only possible development is a horizontal one an interrelationship with a vertical component is missing. This horizontal dimension is finite, so we start turning around ourselves on the spot., faster and faster like in a marmot's wheel. This observation was substantiated from own experiences of acceleration by workshop members. Growing noise levels and other forms of growing pesterisation, arousing feelings of stress were mentioned. The structural violence hinders our free view on things and freedom itself, to recognize the values of love and compassion in the realm of the EFSJ Paradigm. The results of MMDS are growing poverty and misery for 2/3rds of the population on earth, discrimination of women, wars and exploitation of nature.
Only when we learn to live a compassionate life in view of all human suffering and destruction of nature will we be able to find a way out of growing disaster and see the right solutions. As a sample he gave us the fall of the Berlin Wall and his experience with it, as he explained it to us before. The power of compassion is as strong as we feel it. He compared it to an infinite candle that lit Gandhi's life, it was never extinguished in him
The light from it served so many more candles to be lit in others. The dialogue between workshop members showed, that fear and clinging to something drives us into acceleration and only the power of our belief in the strength of the right means, that we can choose freely can create alternatives. The means of the 1. Paradigm are Insight, Dialogue, Prayer and Interrelationship. The means of the 2nd paradigm are Violence and weapons. It is up to us, in what means we want to put our confidence.