Dalai Lama's panel discussion in Fayetteville

Currently waiting to watch the Dalai Lama's panel discussion on nonviolence, Turning Swords Into Plowshares: The Many Paths of Nonviolence, at the University of Arkansas Fayetteville. I'm sure there will be much to blog about later. Will update.

UPDATE (again): Well, something happened on Blogger, and my update I posted yesterday was deleted, so I'll try to recreate it.

The panel discussion also featured Dr. Vincent Harding, a civil rights activist and professor that wrote the speech that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered about the US involvement in Vietnam in 1967, and Sister Helen Prejean, a nun that has worked in the prison system and wrote "Dead Man Walking".

These were the points I took away from the panel:

1. Our actions have motivations for them to become actions. We need to have our motivation be compassion, instead of fear, anger or hatred, like is so common in our culture right now. Compassion must come from within and be genuine. It is not pity. It is a general understanding and wish that all beings find peace and happiness. Nonviolence can be achieved by having compassion be our motivation for our actions. It does not entail that we "roll over" for our enemies either. We must still sometimes prevent wrongdoing, but we should still hold compassion for our enemies, or the cycle of violence will continue.

2. Our enemies are our teachers. In order to practice compassion and forgiveness, we must engage in productive ways with our enemies. It is easy to be compassionate and forgiving to our friends, family, etc., but it is hard to do this with your enemies. We must understand one another, and that all of us want basically the same things. In finding the commonalities, in finding that our enemies are not "demons", but humans with motivations and emotions and makeup similar to our own, it will be easier to find compassion and forgiveness. But this cannot happen if we do not bother to engage in a meaningful way with our enemies.

3. Holding on to fear, anger, hatred, etc. takes time and energy. This energy is better spent on simply trying to do good things; helping people (even if it's just one person); making things better. If you instead try to do good, you simply will not have time for hatred.

I can't help but feel like what I wrote yesterday was better, but the basics were the same. As soon as I can find some video and/or transcripts of the talks, I will post that as well.