Ovi Magazine : The Tamera Peace Research Centre II by Alexandra Pereira

Newsletter

Contact

Istituto di Alti Studi in Geopolitica e Scienze Ausiliarie - IsAG

Murray Hunter: Essential Oils: Art, Agriculture, Science, Industry and Entrepreneurship

BBC News : -

iBite : -

The Tamera Peace Research Centre II
by Alexandra Pereira
2008-03-21 09:07:07

Print - Comment - Send to a Friend - More from this Author

Tamera is no religious sect, Tamera is no science-fiction, Tamera is a Peace Village of the Future, and it is really happening… in the South of Portugal.

Today Tamera is a training and experimental site for the construction of Peace Villages around the world, training several dozens of people every year, who will begin or already begun other Peace Villages spread across the globe.

The settlement of Peace Villages in crisis/war areas worldwide is a special preoccupation and brave action encompassed by Tamera’s project work (including, for example, courses on the Construction of Peace Villages for Palestinians or courses on Non-Violence for Israelis, and vice-versa).

The aim of the Global Campus is to provide all-encompassing education to peace initiators, intentional communities and organizations all around the world. It provides education and training that is considered relevant for a profound culture of peace: spiritual advancement, solar technology, ecology, peaceful activism and non-violence between humans, human and nature, and last but not least, between genders.

«The project was founded in 1995. Today it includes a community of 160 inhabitants, a peace school, special complexes for perma-culture and solar energy, an emerging Solar Village combined with a Technical University, a global network with initial bases for the ‘Global Campus’ in different crisis areas. Additionally we hope for the emergence of a “planetary group” that insures that these key-note thoughts gain a global effect.

May this message contribute to this. May people come together from all over the world who want to realize this concept.»

Dieter Duhm
Tamera, December 2007

The Grace Foundation – for the humanization of money was founded by Sabine Lichtenfels and its aim is to contribute to achieve a profound level of peace worldwide, by bringing together new thinkers and actors within and through a global perspective that is connected to our daily lives, and re-channel money to crisis areas and where it is most needed around the world.

The Grace Foundation supports projects within conflict areas by enhancing self-sustainability, which nowadays includes the implementation of solar technology.

It also holds an “annual pilgrimage” within a conflict area as a way of experiencing deep principles of peace work.

In 2007, a Middle East Grace Pilgrimage was organized, gathering up to 170 international participants (including children) through Israel and Palestine, from Eilat through the Arava desert, walking for almost four weeks. It ended in Bethlehem, where on November 9th, Global GRACE Day, a night vigil for peace took place in front of the separation wall, where the participants meditated and “Imagined Peace” together – they were awake all night imagining together: “What will Peace look like in Israel-Palestine?” Next year the pilgrimage will be held in Colombia in October.

Another project of Tamera is the creation of an Animal Sanctuary, where species which have been exploited as production/working animals by the human being shall experience a space of protection and healing in the sense of the friendship between human being and animal. This will become a research unit for communication and co-operation with animals.

The main purpose is thus to re-think the human-animal relation, learning with nature.

Tamera has a Horse Project and it offers, several times per year, courses where one can learn the non-violent and cooperative dealing with these animals.

Click here to see some beautiful pictures of Tamera’s human-horse interaction.

Print - Comment - Send to a Friend - More from this Author


Comments(26)
Get it off your chest
Name:
Comment:
(comments policy)

Emanuel Paparella	2008-03-21 11:15:03
Being for peace is all well and good. But what about evil and its relationship to peace and justice? Some people do not see real evil in the world, but only reactions to injustices perpetrated by the strong on the weak. Take away the injustices, level the playing field, make the strong weak, and the bad things will go away. This was Marx and Engels -- abolish capitalism, the mechanism for the rich to make the poor miserable, and the misery will go away. This is also home to Rousseau’s romantic idea of the "Noble Savage" -- the peace-loving, untouched, primitive peoples who were untainted by evil until they came into contact with the "civilized" West. Some call this view naïve because it does not take into account the reality of evil within human nature. (continued below)


Emanuel Paparella	2008-03-21 11:16:29
Then there is the cynical view: that of Orwell in "Animal Farm", or Golding in "Lord of the Flies" -- given the opportunity, anyone will take advantage of the weak for his own gain. There is true evil in the world, and negotiating with it won't make it go away. The reality is that the natural state of things is broken. Can the two be reconciled? Let’s see. There was a man in Palestine who was born in Bethlehem and went around preaching peace for three years and then was crucified. Some are convinced that he resurrected and will ultimately vanquish evil and some have called him The Prince of Peace. Nietzsche did not think much of this Prince of Peace because he advocated a slave morality of “turning the other cheek” when in fact evil has to be struggled against. Nietzsche had a point, for indeed peace "is a byproduct". Peace will happen only when evil is vanquished. It is simply not possible to force someone to be peaceful if they don't want to be. The only way to ensure peace is to "tie up the strongman". That's how Jesus is the Prince of Peace. Not because he always turns the other cheek. Quite the contrary. He is the Prince of Peace because he will crush the enemy under his heel. There is real evil in the world which will not respond to negotiations set up by peace movements, and if one does not believe that all he needs to do is read the headlines in the daily newspaper.


Sand	2008-03-21 12:58:53
An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind. Mohandas Gandhi


Emanuel Paparella	2008-03-21 16:27:16
“A person or a nation, can be considered peace loving only if it is ready to cede its military force to the international authorities and to renounce every attempt to achieve its interests abroad by the use of force. Peace can never be secured by threats, but only by an honest attempt to create mutual trust.” Albert Einstein


Emanuel Paparella	2008-03-21 17:54:40
P.S. The cynic will undoubtedly call the above standard by Einstein by which to judge a peace loving nation too idealistic, but actually even that standard does not go far enough, since it leaves armies and armament in place albeit in control of an international polity. The ideal is a time and place where armies and even the police will become unnecessary and an anachronism. De Chardin had a name for it: "the Omega point." Some theologians call it Resurrection. Prophets like Dostoyevsky and Silone envisioned it in their utopian novels. We, lesser luminaries, can at least hope and pray for it even if we happen to be atheists. Not to do so is to become not part of the solution but but part of the problem of evil.


Sand	2008-03-21 18:16:19
The human race looks most unlikely to dispense with weaponry in the foreseeable future but evidently religious people are gullible enough to believe anything, even that atheists will pray. To whom they might pray is an interesting question.


Emanuel Paparella	2008-03-21 20:34:20
A caricature of prayer by those who believe that the universe created itself and evolves randomly and has no purpose and meaning is that of prayer as asking for gifts as from Santa Claus. A better notion is that of aspiration and hope of seeing things as they are and knowing that such is not the ways they ought to be. The cynic, having no hope and no asprations, convinced that this the best of all possible world, cannot possibly pray, even if he he goes to Church, or temple and goes through empty sterile liturgical motions.


Sand	2008-03-21 21:24:24
From the Merriam-Webster dictionary: 1 a (1): an address (as a petition) to God or a god in word or thought (2): a set order of words used in praying b: an earnest request or wish2: the act or practice of praying to God or a god 3: a religious service consisting chiefly of prayers —often used in plural4: something prayed for5: a slight chance


Emanuel Paparella	2008-03-21 22:17:58
Try the Song of Gongs or the prophet Amos and you'll get a better picture. To describe the relationship with my wife by the dictionary definition of marriage would be as absurd as to describe man's ongoing relationship to the God of the universe by the dictionary definition of prayer. Those who have axes to trivialize religion tend to subscribe to that kind of absurdity. Here is a definition by an Greek Orthodox bishop whose name escapes me: prayer with the liing God is equivalent of enering a dark cave in the middle ot the night knowing that there is a tiger that inhabits it. I'll take that to the insipid conventional definition of the dictionary.


Emanuel Paparella	2008-03-21 22:21:52
Errata above: Gong = Song; liibg = living; enering = entering.


Emanuel Paparella	2008-03-21 22:25:46
P.S. You may also wish to look at Jacob's all night struggle with an angel which results in the conferring of a new name: Israel and his limping condition. That too was prayer of the highest form.


Sand	2008-03-22 05:02:43
Frankly, I like the Song of Gongs better. Far more poetic. If you are going to use a word unconventionally, you have to make that clear if you want to be understood. The concept of an atheist praying still strikes me as idiotic but much of what you say falls within that category so at least you are consistent.


Emanuel Paparella	2008-03-22 13:10:19
Which of course allows you to demonstrate to the reader that your bias and bigotry vis a vis religion allows you to consistently miss the point of what is being elucidated.


Sand	2008-03-22 13:30:05
Which is, as far as I can disentangle it from your religious nonsense, that the world should dismiss its armies and destroy all its weapons. In a world that is full of psychotic power this is obviously a formula for suicide at worst and frightful brutality at minimum. What you seem to be advocating is that all humans should immediately think alike and be kind to each other which is surely a cockeyed wish with no basis for realization. Evil as an absolute is quite various for the ignorant which has no qualms about stoning "witches" to death or condoning imprisonment and torture for a woman who decides to go out shopping by herself or has been raped. Humans are simply too crazy to be allowed free punishment for "evil". No creature in nature goes without some form of self defense and humans, whatever your wacky ideas, are natural creatures.


Emanuel Paparella	2008-03-22 14:50:16
Another demonstration, if we needed one, of your bias allowing you to wholly miss the point which was not that heaven had arrived on earth (that is your caricature not mine; I said evil needs to be struggled against...) but that people like Dostoyevisky and Silone could envision an utopia that the cynic will never be able to envision, and will in fact caricaturize, because he has reduced Man to simply another animal roaming in the woods. Changes are that he will need to go and look up Utopia in the dictionary. O tempora, o mores.


Sand	2008-03-22 15:49:47
Another demonstration, if we needed one, of someone who seems totally inattentive to the events occurring daily in the world. No one suggests that people should meekly submit to abuse nor is this likely to occur. But the vague suggestion that everybody should behave because they are told to do so is so outlandish as to be psychotic. Current events in the world clearly show that wild creatures do not need woods to perform their horrors and that religious motives, whether justified or not, are a large factor in their performance.


Emanuel Paparella	2008-03-23 00:52:38
So logically, given the extreme options explored above, all we need to do is eliminate religion as "the opium of the people," the rich as the exploiters of the poor and then we all return to a natural animalistic materialistic sort of life and all be well with the world. If that is not naivitè and in fact down right idiocy, I don't know what is.


Sand	2008-03-23 05:14:03
To claim that curing cancer does not solve all problems is no reason for abandoning the search for a cancer cure.


Emanuel Paparella	2008-03-23 09:14:27
Quite right. Both Vico and Kierkegaard identified the desease (which K. calls "unto death")and it is most lethal and insidious because "the enlightened" rationalist carries it around and does not know he has it: he looks for it externally. It is called "the barbarism of the intellect," more dangerou by far than the barbarism of old of the sixth and seventh century AD. In modern times it begins with Descartes and envisions Man as nothing more than a machine of sort with no soul and no will and no ethical concerns responding to natural stimuli and wholly boxed in a deterministic universe. Fortunately both Vico and Kierkegaard have not been burned yet. Were we to stand on their shoulders you'd be able to see much further than what is in front of our nose and we wouldn't have to repeat our history eternally.


Sand	2008-03-23 19:59:33
Before one starts theorizing with fantasies it is wise to examine what is in front of one's nose and attempt to comprehend what is close at hand. As I noted previously, a cockroach standing on someone's shoulders sees with cockroach eyes and analyzes with a cockroach mind.


Emanuel Paparella	2008-03-24 01:20:01
Point missed once again. The problem is deeper; it is that of the man who, having reduced his nature to that of a mere animal, stands on the shoulders of giants of the intellect and claims credit for having invented the wheel.


Sand	2008-03-24 06:15:19
The phrase "a mere animal", tottering with its weight of hubris, says it all.


Sand	2008-03-24 06:49:34
My reference to cockroaches requires some extension. First, let me extend my profound respect for cockroaches, a species that has had the sense to comprehend its limitations and possibilities far better than humanity with its overwhelming and horrifying egotism. Humanity has inhabited Earth for only a speck of time compared to the venerable cockroach which probably will be around long after mankind has rendered Earth uninhabitable for itself and many other wonderful species through its fantastic misuse of its technology and idiotic misconception of its place in the natural order of all living things. This disrespect of all life other than human is evident daily in the vociferous destruction of fantastic and wonderful species and can, at end, only ensure that the human species will have a somewhat spectacular but very temporary existence.


Sand	2008-03-24 18:23:22
Animal inferior? See Dogs At Work And Play - Yahoo! News Photos http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/Dogs-Work-And-Play-Okinawa-islands/ss/events/lf/082503dogs/im:/080324/481/7112a33374a449a1bc300d81e0247b52/


Emanuel Paparella	2008-03-27 15:35:35
Ah, to be reicarnated as a dog and live in dogs' Utopia with plenty of bones to catch. Alas, one cannot pray for it if one is an atheist, but one can hope for it. Go for it.


Sand	2008-03-28 06:52:17
No need to pray, Paparella, as you already have demonstrated all the qualities of an animal so inflated with self importance that your human intellect potential is totally neglected.