The moth flew into the oil lamp,
The blind man walks with a torch,
The cripple runs in his wheelchair,
A fool’s rhetoric is deep and learned,
The laughing poet has run out of breath and died.
The religious spin circles, in accordance with religion;
If they had not practiced their religion, they could not spin.
The sinner cannot spin according to religion;
He spins according to not knowing how to spin.
The yogis spin by practicing yoga;
If they don’t have chakras to spin, they are not yogis.
Chögyam is spinning, watching the spinning/samsara;
If there is no samsara/spinning, there is no Chögyam.

Likewise, I agree that power dynamics can render the effectiveness of something like NVC a moot point. Although sometimes perhaps it’s less the practice itself that is being ineffective as the number of people attempting it. Rosenberg has achieved some notable successes just by himself. Imagine if a group of people, even a large group of people, were all attempting to reach an organization through these means. Maybe, still, nothing would get through. But one thing I’m sure of: labelling people as Bad pretty much never works. Impugning someone’s motivation tends in fact to have the opposite result to our wish and will make the situation even more solid.

At the same time, in my own experience and in a steady stream of stories that has appeared on this website, it seems SI has a big, big problem with empathetic listening. Hence the degree of frustration sometimes evident here.

I do think Nonviolent Communication promotes a basic respect and empathy towards the “other,” and at best can result in a genuine shift in understanding, an ability to step into the other’s shoes–a phrase Dzongsar Khyentse has used in discussing how tonglen works.

I have little experience with it and sometimes wonder if it might become a formula (like anything I guess), ie too rigid. In any event one of the times I saw it being practiced it seemed to me a little unnecessarily “cool”. Again, that might be a misunderstanding. But in general I’m impressed with the framework it creates for a certain kind of mindful, compassionate speech.

It’s all there in the dharma of course, but I feel we don’t actually receive enough teachings specifically on the practice of speech. There are the guidelines against harshness and gossip and so on, but for situations of conflict or aversion or hatred NVC provides an actual technique which can eventually get you somewhere. In fact, this relates to one of the main issues I have with SI, which is its recourse to the practices of punishment, humiliation, and exclusion–so utterly antithetical, of course, to the view of basic goodness. If those exercising power within Shambhala were engaged in NVC, such practices could not be sustained.

Just finished “Diamonds, Guns and Steel” by Jared Diamond and “The Alphabet Versus the Goddess” by Leonard Shlain, both sweeping looks at the development of civilization going back much farther than 8,000 years.

I don’t see there or in any other such sources I’ve come across any archeological evidence for the peaceful people who made a mistake and created hierarchy about 8,000 years ago, thereby, according to the NVC model, creating the way we think that is so destructive.

I think that’s hooey.

Civilization became more complex as populations expanded, and in an evolutionary and slow pace, systems were adopted that worked. If they didn’t work, they perished, and there are lots and lots of examples of that as well. It wasn’t all due to a conscious decision someone made way back when to create a language justifying domination. That sounds like comic book logic.

There are more details to the model, but that model is also based on the blank slate approach to human mind which is proving to by wildly mistaken in key ways. We are not how we are because someone told us to be that way without our even knowing we had a choice. This is a common fallacy of religions as well. If religions have the power to transform us, it isn’t because the pope tells us how to behave. The work is internal and much more difficult than that.

The other major flaw in it, as a universal approach anyway, is that it assumes a conflict between equals or semi equals, or at least people capable of doing damage to each other, and negotiating from that platform by emphasizing the other party’s needs.

I think in a situation in which one party holds all the power and other none, there is no neutral place available, no balance of power to give both parties pause. If one could bring both parties to the table, it would be a theater, the one with power participating only in so far as there was curiosity to see if it could get its way by stealth. If not… back to business. So I can imagine this helping in tribal conflicts in Africa. I can’t see any way it would be helpful in places like Israel, Iran, Afghanistan, or any other places in which there is a strong central authority with a complex hierarchy that is pushing a destructive agenda that even large segments of the population find wrong or damaging.

It sounds like a therapy-esque approach. Very effective in some situations, and not at all in others, because it is based on a rather narrow model of human behavior which isn’t really how we all work.

In the inspiration that if religion or therapy or politics isn’t working, it isn’t because of our “failure to resemble an idealized model that someone blind to reality has managed to promote”. (from “The Black Swan” by N.N.Taleb)
James Elliott

Yes, the disregard for dissent by CTR students is mind blowing, especially when one considers the intelligence of those students as part of CTR’s legacy, which I have no doubt that CTR himself did. Otherwise, why would he have worked so hard and intimately with so many of us? He poured his heart’s blood into us, and it was pretty hot stuff. He gave us a mission to carry on his work – together, not isolated and marginalized by the organizations he created. But the organizations – esp. Vajradhatu and Shambhala Training – were dissipated and diluted and then morphed out of existence, replaced by this lukewarm hybrid of Shambhala Buddhism that claims to carry on CTR’s lineage, but has gotten rid of the hot stuff of the Kagyu lineage and Shambhala Training.

Well, we still have CTR’s hot stuff in our veins, . We haven’t gone brain dead and I don’t think we’re going to shut up.

Video 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8fbxPAXBPE&feature=related