Our Mission. The mission of the Metta Center is to promote the transition to a nonviolent future by making the logic, history, and yet-unexplored potential of nonviolence available to activists and agents of cultural change (which ultimately includes all of us).  We help practitioners use nonviolence more safely and effectively, and anyone interested to understand and articulate it more fully.

Find out more about us by watching this short, introductory video to our work and our message, and why Gandhi called it “the greatest force at the disposal of humankind.”

(Make sure you watch it on ‘full screen’.)

Our Story. The Metta Center for Nonviolence was founded in 1982 by students of Sri Eknath Easwaran, including Michael Nagler, who is today the president of the organization. Arun Gandhi, one of the Mahatma’s grandsons, once said that Sri Easwaran understood his grandfather “better than anyone around.” Drawing upon that legacy, we have experimented with many educational methods to help us see into the heart of nonviolence and share our insights with anyone wishing to use or understand what Gandhi called “the greatest power at the disposal of humankind,” so that neither threat nor exchange but “integrative power” may become the predominant way human beings live and resolve their conflicts on this planet.  Metta has increased its activities and explored many new fields since 2007, when Michael retired from the University of California to devote most of his time and energy to this work.

Our Vision. Humanity is slowly but steadily awakening to the underlying truth of our existence, which is our fundamental unity with one another and all of life.  In this “new” vision, supported alike by the ancient wisdom traditions of virtually all cultures and by breakthroughs in very modern science, nonviolence is the norm for all relationships just as violence was acceptable and all but normalized in the vision of the world as separate, material, and without overall meaning.  Nonviolence is, as Gandhi said, “not the inanity it has been taken for down the ages.”  It is thus both a consequence and an enabling factor in this great awakening.  It is no coincidence that nonviolence is increasing both quantitatively — with more than one-half of the world’s population experiencing a major manifestation in their home country —  and qualitatively — with new forms of experimentation and learning across cultures increasingly practiced.  Metta is proud to play a key role in developing this central part of the “great turning” to a more humane world.

Core Values. We are blessed to be working with a principle that already embodies within itself the highest values toward which we could aspire: compassion, tolerance, respect for all life, honesty, among others.  We try as far as in us lies to adopt and reflect the values of nonviolence, as this science of living was understood by Mahatma Gandhi and other pioneers, in our own lives and the way we work together at Metta and with our many friends and supporters.  “Heart Unity” (the desire for others’ welfare regardless of surface differences), localism (svadeshi: dealing with our own strengths and weaknesses before reaching past our present capacities), and of course the attempt to reduce any trace of ill-will toward others even where we feel we must disagree with or resist their ideas or actions, are among these values.

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