Saturday, April 21 at 11 AM EST
This is a rush transcript. To purchase a copy of the interview, contact Wellness Radio.
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Deepak Chopra, Sacha Stone and Jonathan Granoff, at a Global Impact Forum Planning Meeting,
GSI NY Office
March, 2007
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DC: I am Deepak Chopra, this is Wellness Radio. I have a very special guest in the next segment, I will tell you about him in a minute but let’s start off with this beautiful poem from Rumi it’s called Dervishes:
You've heard descriptions
of the ocean of non-existence.
Try, continually, to give yourself
into that ocean. Every workshop
has its foundations set
on that emptiness.
The Master of all masters
works with nothing.
The more nothing comes into your work,
the more the presence will be there.
Dervishes gamble everything. They lose,
and win the Other, the emptiness
which animates this.
We have talked so much! Remember
what we have not said.
And keep working.
Laziness and disdain are not devotions.
Your efforts will bring a result.
As dawn lightens, blow out the candle.
Dawn is in your eyes now.
So this morning we’ve been discovering how our collective consciousness and sometimes the psychosis in our collective consciousness manifests in a particular episode that kind of bursts through as a very violent turbulent act but it’s actually part of the matrix of collective thought forms that is resulting in, that and unless we address the psychosis of the collective mind we will always have these episodes it is no good to blame anyone, no good to punish anyone we have to understand the nature of consciousness.
I have a very special guest with me in the studio today who actually understands this on a very deep level, he has dedicated his life to the total elimination of nuclear weapons worldwide through a shift in collective consciousness.
My guest is Jonathan Granoff. He is an author, he’s an international peace activist but in a good manner, not an angry peace activist only add anger to the collective consciousness.
He is currently the president of the Global Security Institute, a non-profit organization committed to the elimination of nuclear weapons. He serves as the co-chair for the American Bar Associations Committee on Arms Control and National Security and as the Vice -President of the NGO Committee on Disarmament Peace and Security at the United Nations, which is regarded as a primary ally of the international movement for arms control, peace, and disarmament.
So if we wanted to we could talk to Jonathan today, we could him forever, we’re going to have to get him back on this show many times, because here’s somebody who is so totally in the mainstream in talking to presidents of countries, in talking to international decision makers. Two weeks ago I was in his office and the President of Slovenia was there in his office talking about disarmament. He’s been invited by international Heads of States to help them clarify their thinking on arms control.
Yet I know Jonathan to be also a Sufi, and to be a great scholar of that, to be totally delved into the traditions and wisdom of the world so I would like to first of all welcome Jonathan
JG: Thank you so much, what an introduction. My teacher used to beat me by praise, there is nothing more difficult to take than the burden of praise because to get any sense of balance one must get past the burden of praise and the avoidance of blame and really have that beautiful openness that you have Deepak that embraces so many different kinds of people, and gives them a forum and gives them a sense that they have the potential to awaken more fully to the greatest treasure and the greatest source of peace which is within their own selves. And to be able to bring that into the public through the radio is truly a gift and it’s an honor to be here.
DC: It’s my privilege and my honor and I just love my interaction with you at Alliance for a New Humanity. This is what we are trying to see if we can create that new humanity through a shift in collective. Consciousness whether we use the radio or the media or the expertise of people like you or music, I mean they all have to come together now this is the time that we can actually influence the Akashic feel because we have these technologies, I think of the internet and I say this must be the cloning of our collective soul now that is manifesting the Akashic record as the internet as the radio as all these different waves to communicate and influence our collective mind.
JG: The Akashic records for people who are just turning into Deepak’s vocabulary relates to a very ancient vatic understanding that behind the scene of form there is recorded record and source, Plato called it the realm of ideas in the west, but its the source of all ideas, of all creativity, of potentiality, but its also the place in which previous actions are stored in a sense and so it has many dimensions.
Our physics in the West has yet to discover this realm, which Deepak talks about with absolute personal familiarity. It’s very much the way the Western medical system doesn’t really have a way of measuring the tools that acupuncture uses, the energy that flows through the body, that’s released by a few needles. And yet if any of you have been acupunctured you know that it works very well, yet we can’t measure it, there are so many discoveries that we have yet to make and if we only have a greater sense humility, that the process of discovery in a way is a process of wonder, when we have this sense that we’ve found it all out, when we have a closed system when we know everything and thus we have the right to control the planet, that arrogance is what gets in enormous problems.
DP: I’m speaking to Jonathan Granoff who is the current president of the Global Security Institute. So Jonathan I want to go a little bit into your background. I know you don’t want to talk about yourself but I want the listeners to actually really know how come an XXX, you know think of lawyers as very hostile people, all these studies on hostility have been done on lawyers. A study was done at Harvard Law School where they did a study on hostility and they had these different groups that scored very high, first of all lawyers usually score the highest on hostility scores, the hostile lawyers are more prone to premature death from cardiovascular illness hostility is the number one psychological risk factor for premature death, if people could just understand the hostility, the need for vengeance is actually a risk factor, just if nothing for their own selves they should turn to that part of themselves that is compassionate, that has love.
Tell me a little bit about your Sufi background. It’s very important because you know with that background you’re coming to mainstream institutions and coming up with strategies for conflict resolution and disarmament and we want to get to that but I want our listeners to get a little bit of idea about your background
JG: I grew up back stage, my father was the press agent for Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and so I saw how our culture is constructed by people and that many of the icons of our society are created by people, are constructed by people, they don’t just naturally occur, they are thought out and planned and created.
DC: that is such an interesting idea that the icon is projection of our collective psyche, as our idealistic notion of something whether it is in entertainment or war hero or whatever
JG: absolutely but in our society in which we have commodified we commercialized everything, we commercialize and commodify
DC: celebrities become heroes
JG: exactly, whereas celebrities in some cultures in some, societies are pointers to something greater than themselves, something really divine actually, I mean that’s where the tradition of the archetype hero comes from. The hero in most cultures is the character who goes on a vision quest, frees himself from the boundaries of his society, connects with the divine and then comes back into society with a message or guidance.
DG: the classic hero’s journey
JG: But in our society if you look at the pornography of the trivial and the media, it really is just a way or titillating more desire. “You’re not good enough, you’ve got to become this icon, and the way you do it is by purchasing this, getting this”, and it disempowers people. Now to some extent it does empower people to engage and that is one of the healthy parts of pop culture.
So my father was very involved in helping to create pop culture and my mother was singer, was a pop singer, Kitty Kallen, she sang “I’m Beginning to See the Light” “Little Things Mean a Lot” “Chapel in the Moonlight” all these pop songs I always heard as having another dimension of meaning “don’t have to buy me diamonds and pearls, champagne, rubies and such, honestly honey they just cost money, little things mean a lot” talking about the gesture of kindness. And she has a huge hit record of that.
So I grew up with a sort of liberated perspective on the icons of our culture. When I was about 12 years old I was lying in the back yard of our home in the suburbs of New York looking at the sky
DC: I am speaking to Jonathan Granoff of the Global Security Institute and he is telling us about his formative years
JG: and I was contemplating the infinity of the firmaments and reflecting how can infinity fit inside my consciousness, my consciousness is finite. And in the tension of this mystery that the finite consciousness of the self which is like a cup that can contain the entire ocean of infinity
DG: Jonathan, I hate to interrupt this, so beautiful what you are saying, but you know there is poem of Rumi where the child says “my eyes are so small how can this great love exist inside of me” and his mother says “your eyes are small but they see enormous things.” So what do you think how can infinity fit inside
JG: Yes, how can we grasp that which is far beyond ourselves? Ultimately that’s Descartes’ mediation after he decides “I think therefore I am” but then he continues on his quest for the divine and discovers the great mystery that within himself is this profound beauty and from that he concludes that he could not have created that beauty within himself and therefore there must be a divine power.
I was about 12 and I was meditating profoundly on this paradox of consciousness and I had an experience of wholeness and unity with the source of my own being and it contained within in it the sense that there was something far greater than I could learn from religion or in school or from any of these things. So when I graduated university I set out on a quest and I was privileged to meet a great Sufi SAGE, a saintly man well over 100 who had been found in the jungles of Sri Lanka named Bawa which just means father, and I went and I studied with him and he taught very simply that the only reality is the reality of god, and that which separates us from one another is anger, falsehood, jealousy, hostility, pride, arrogance, that all of these ego-minding bondages separate us from one-another but they also separate us from god, and the same qualities in society that bring us together, love, patience, justice, tranquility, they liberate us from the confines of the ego mind, they open up a field of consciousness that bring us into oneness with our own selves and through that the connectedness to god.
So I have the privilege of living with someone who had freed himself from the attachment to everything that changes and who just expressed love, kindness and compassion. Being with somebody who lived that is sort of like walking down the street and you step on the sidewalk and there is the Grand Canyon in front of you; the leap of humanity between those who are asleep, somewhat like myself, asleep in the dream of form and attachment and someone who is free and open and embracing of all lives without any distinction is so huge and once you see a person like that you say this is the why and everything else is the how.
So we are so preoccupied in our society with the how we end up with medicine without wellness, law without justice, religion without transcendence, business without providing goods and services, the pursuit of security which breads to insecurity and that is essentially what nuclear weapons is and now people like yourself are coming back into medicine saying “no”, the “why” of medicine is not just to get the body better but it is to get wellness in its entirety.
DC: The return of the memory of wholeness.
JG: And the “why” of law, and this in an answer to your question, is justice. And justice is the application of the spiritual principle of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” it’s the principle of equity.
DG: I am reminding my listeners that we are talking to Jonathan Granoff, the current president of the Global Security Institute. So Jonathan you come with that background and now you have this activity globally for basically, disarmament in a sense, starting with nuclear disarmament, starting with ourselves, tell me about some of your current activities at this moment.
JG: I would say there are three legal instruments of the 20th century that are essential for our civilization to go forward. First is the UN Charter which is based on the concept of cooperative security as Sen. Chuck Hagel said the difference between the first half of this century and the second is the UN system. And that premise that there is an international norm of law is embodied in that and as an American, and I know this show is broadcast worldwide, treaties and laws are fundamental to our structure our constitution of the US makes treaties the supreme court of the land and so the UN charter, a treaty to which we are a party, is the supreme law of the land.
The second most important legal instrument, I would say, is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which sets as a norm that all human beings are bestowed with the right to dignity, the right to peace, the right to freedom of religion, freedom of expression, these fundamental standards and this is the first time in human history in which an instrument says this is for everybody; these are not Christian rights or Jewish rights or Muslim rights, these are our human rights.
The third most important legal instrument is the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which is a bargain, in which all the countries in the world except for India, Israel, and Pakistan, have agreed that they would either, if they have nuclear weapons they would negotiate their elimination, and if they don’t have nuclear weapons they will not obtain them, in exchange for that promise of disarmament by the Nuclear Weapons States. I have been working with governments and diplomats to try and build coalitions that will pressure the Nuclear Weapons States to live up to what I consider to be both a moral imperative; to stop threatening all future generations with these horrific devices, and we’re talking about devices in which the triggering mechanisms are larger than the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that are illegal: the International Court of Justice has unanimously decided in 1996 in a decision that there must be the negotiated elimination of them. They are impractical, you cannot use them against a state that has nuclear weapons, and it would be patently immoral to decimate tens if not hundreds of millions of people in a state that doesn’t have them.
DC: but see Jonathan, right now, we hear in the news North Korea is developing them, Iran is developing then and from what I know a number of Middle East countries and this seems to in stoppable do you think it can ever stop unless we ourselves participate in its elimination, the United States.
JG: First, Iran doesn’t have any and nobody thinks they will get them for a years and they have conceded that they will subject themselves to any form of inspection I didn’t want to get that deep in the bushes, but another aspect of the Non proliferation Treaty is the guarantee of the right to nuclear energy. So that’s a different question of how do we control this dangerous technology of using the subatomic particle to generate energy so that it can’t be used for weapons. And North Korea has clearly said that if they are reintegrated in the international community and the Korean War ends and they have a security assurance, which we haven’t given them, that they are willing to get rid of their nuclear weapons. I was in North Korea in June, I was privileged to be a guest of Kim DeJung who was the person who stared the democracy revolution in that country and you really see the difference I mean South Korea is a booming economy because of the freedom, when they were under a military junta that crushed the human spirit and crushed the creativity they were just as impoverished as the North. But because 300 students were shot and killed by the State in Kwonju and sacrificed their blood for the freedom of all of us really that country changed, and so the people in Korea are looking at the dynamics that took place between East and West Germany where you had to balance the economy so I saw businessmen in the South and labor leaders who were passionate about reunification and I saw North Koreans also wanting reunification, and this really surprised me. So I see these as symptoms, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, these are symptoms of a regime that is unsustainable, it is unsustainable to have a handful of countries say that our security needs are superior to everyone else’s and that we have a unique privilege to threaten everybody else and we are going to deprive you of that. That is morally incomprehensible and more importantly its totally impractical.
If the United States and Russia who still have tens of thousands of nuclear weapons thousands of them on alert just like they were at the height of the Cold War were serious about their commitment to bring us to a world without nuclear weapons, they would: 1) agree to cutting off production of any more fissile material, 2) agree never to test nuclear weapons anymore because that would prevent other countries from testing and miniaturizing and putting them on missiles 3) they would take the weapons off of alert status they are, we’re on like a 15 minute warning, if a computer error takes place, and there have been many such errors
DC: What for, what for? There’s such drama about nothing. I mean who’s attacking us right now? And if a terrorist were to attack us, this wouldn’t prevent it.
JG: Not only would it not prevent it, but by continuing to have these things, and producing the wherewithal for them its inevitable that by accident or design they will be used. And that’s why, that’s why awakening consciousness, that’s why a movement for people to become aware of the dynamics inside themselves the demons that the nuclear weapons is Russia are pointed at are within the psyche of the Russian people. The actual physical manifestation of that is that as we sit here in New York, Deepak, there are dozens or nuclear weapons pointed at us. And these are not nuclear weapons like Hiroshima and Nagasaki some are in the megaton range which is a million tons of TNT, Nagasaki, Hiroshima were 15 thousand tons, these are huge, they would vaporize the city and they’re pointed at us right now. Are the Russians pointing them at us because we’re really a threat? What is the dynamic within the psyche of the Russians? And of course we in the United States have several hundred weapons pointed at the Russian people. They’re pointed at human beings. Why are they pointed there? Are the Russian people about to attack us? Does anybody seriously believe that? And yet we keep this dynamic at the ready. It’s become so utterly indefensible that in January 4th of this year, George Shultz who was Secretary of State with Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, the Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn and Bill Perry Former Secretary of Defense of the United States came out with Op-Ed in The Wall Street Journal calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons. So it is a small, I would say cognoscenti within the laboratories and the military establishment who have enormous power, enormous wealth and resources, at their disposal who are intransigent to holding onto this.
DC: So tell me, we have lots of people listening to us right now, and they might be asking, “is this a hopeless situation? What can I do, I am here, listening to you, in Arkansas, I know the wonderful work you are doing in the United Nations, how can I help create more peace in the world?”
JG: Creating peace in the world is of course an inside job, keeping the world and keeping the school open is an outside job
DC: They’re both connected though,
JG: Absolutely. Disarmament must begin in the heart. I believe that we are in the first moment in human history in which the admonitions of the wide and the practical imperatives come together because of the integration of our planet into a whole global civilization. In order to honor the sacred web of life which all the wise have been telling us we have to constrain our business practices; we can no longer threaten the climate, we can no longer threaten the oceans,
DC: It’s all so connected,
JG: it’s so connected and in order to have the cooperation needed for that you can’t have a two tiered security rule the nuclear apartheid rule. The other moral imperative is to care for the poor, to care for those less fortunate than yourselves to cultivate compassion as a moral imperative which means the unacceptability that yesterday 20 – 30 thousand children died of preventable diseases and hunger when we produce enough food and we have the wherewithal to prevent those diseases. So I would say that we must ask every single political candidate the following three questions whether you’re in India, in Arkansas or in New York, and those three questions are: What is you’re plan to deal with unnecessary pandemic poverty? 2) What is your plan to protect the global commons, the climate, the oceans, the rainforest, upon which all life depends? And what is your plan to get rid of nuclear weapons? Not should we deal with poverty and unnecessary suffering, not should we protect the sacred web of life that is our home, not should we get rid of nuclear weapons
DC: how are you going to do it what’s the plan
JG: what’s your plan? Now, if they don’t have a plan, there’s a plan for the climate, it’s called the Kyoto protocol, and that’s very easily defined. If they don’t have plan there are 182 countries in the United Nations, in the world, not in the United Nations, that have a road map that they’ve agreed upon to move us toward the elimination of nuclear weapons to walk us down the ladder. First of all take them off of alert, come down to low numbers and stop pointing them at your friends. And with respect to poverty as you know there’s the Millennium Development Goals, your friend Jefferey Sachs, there’s a plan I was there at the World Summit on Social Development in Coopenhagen had 122 Heads of State laid out a plan, we have the technology, the social and economic technology. What we need is people who can move from the love of self to selfless love and selfless love is caring about future generations cause they’re not going to give anything to you, selfless love is saying for the sake of the sacredness of the environment, not because I can develop a new technology that’ll make me rich but because it is sovereign, we don’t own it, for the sake of life itself we have to stop threatening all life with these nuclear devices.
DC: My friends, if you’re listening to this then you know that people like Jonathan Granoff are out there making a difference in the world, what are you going to do in your life today to create more peace, what are you going to do to get rid of these false demons that you have, that you think that money can bring happiness, that weapons can bring security, and technology can bring health these are false promises and we have to beyond that. Any last words Jonathan?
JG: You, Deepak, reiterate time and again the power of intention because there is a power that has put us here, into this beautiful web of life, that has placed love within our hearts, and when you make it your intention to serve, that mysterious power that gives you this breath, that gives this heart beat, but that gives all other lives that same mystery and you want to apply that principle not only of wellness to yourself but justice and compassion for others that power will arrange opportunities for it to become manifest in your life as a way of life: if you are in business, justice and well being will become part of your business, if you’re in law, you will find a way of doing it and this is the great mystery.
DC: “You are that mystery”, Rumi says, “and I am with you now, now nowhere again inside that majesty.”
JG: We are the fish in the water looking for the water, we live inside of God.
DC: By God when you see your beauty, you’ll be the idol of yourself.
JG: and he is the one who is looking through all eyes without separation, he is the one within us looking for himself, for we are never separated from that divine witness.
DC: The whole universe exists within your house; call from yourself. |
