THE UNIQUENESS OF BEING

There is one remarkable line from the Gita that is central to nonviolence: "Of all the world's wonders, which is the most wonderful? . . . That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes that he himself will die."

Death is a given. Our own life is supremely important to us - our only experience of consciousness - yet we must come to terms with its inevitable end. At least for those of us who are atheists, there is no afterlife. Part of what makes nonviolence so powerful is its respect for the unique nature of every person. Not one of us has existed before, or will exist again. Each of us contains a kind of "private universe" of experience. It is good to live, good to experience life, good to enjoy that experience, good to rejoice in the wonders of life. All the more urgent, if we are here but once, and briefly, to feel entitled to experience the delights.

It is this extraordinary uniqueness of being that makes the pacifist so absolutely unwilling to destroy another person, for with each death a universe ends, and can never be replaced. How wonderfully we are made, how different from one another. To respect and understand the uniqueness of each person may make it possible also to sense what we have in common, even if what we have in common is only the certainty of our own end. Yet we must be reconciled with the fact that we must die. What we do not have to do is kill - that alone is our choice.

We come in different sizes, shapes, sexes, colors, each of us bearing different cultural and family memories. Nonviolence is about a society in which, far from having people conform to some standard, each person is able to realize, during his or her life, their greatest potential.