THE MIRJA SCHOOL OF PEACE

The Mirja School is a school of peace within the framework of the future-oriented project "Tamera". It is located in the Alentejo region of Portugal. Here, a new concept for global peace work has been developed over the last several years: the "Healing Biotopes Project". Healing biotopes are global cultural centers with a few hundred inhabitants, in which new forms of cooperation between the human being, nature, and universal consciousness are developed. Their power of survival is rooted in a principle of life - the „universal state of being“. The Mirja School teaches the knowledge and skills that are necessary for the establishment of functioning healing biotopes as well as for the establishment of a worldwide network between them. The school is associated with a Political Ashram, in which the thoughts underlying the basic training are deepened through mental and bodily training.

1.
Our current human civilization is at the end of its tether. Financial and political globalization is a globalization of violence. Democratically elected governments participate in genocide. The global plutocracy feeds itself by annihilating its victims. The inferno gets closer every day. Tormented tribes, individuals, and animals have no protection and they have no forum where they can make themselves heard. The basic values of human co-existence - truth, trust, empathy, solidarity, and help for those in need - are ruined.
We no longer need reforms; we need peace. Peace is not a reform; it is the most complete revolution of our circumstances in life. The human species needs a new concept for living for its existence on planet Earth. We need to be embedded in the whole of Creation in a new way. We need a new order of human community, a new concept for sexuality and love, and a new kind of political networking. We also need to enter into a fundamental understanding with all other creatures on Earth.

2.
The Mirja School is a training and education center for the creation of a global force for peace. Here, peace workers are trained for the cultural and political tasks that will be facing us during the next years and decades. It also serves as a vehicle for finding one's profession within the framework of a new planetary culture of peace. The thoughts and goals of this peace work are described in the "Tamera Manifesto„ (Dieter Duhm, March 1999).
All co-workers of the Mirja School - both students and teachers - are at a higher level of apprenticeship. They learn in a creative continuum, where all signs and impulses - be they dreams or
daily events, political news, or an unexpected phone call - are integrated into the training. As Martin Buber would say: We pray, and God answers us through the events that we are confronted with.
All students at the Mirja School have previously attended various events at Tamera. The minimum
course of study at the Mirja School takes one year. It
consists of three months of basic training, followed by a nine-month practicum. For professional co-workers the training lasts three years. During this time the students - who are mostly between 20 and 40 years old - receive an overview of the Healing Biotopes Project, of other international projects, of the various tasks they might decide to take on, and of the professions that will be needed in an emerging culture of peace. The basic training serves to prepare them to work within the global network for peace, such as participating in the work of Tamera, cooperating with other communities and centers, making contact with old peace tribes, or participating in humanitarian interventions in areas of crisis. They especially study the theory and practice of implementing possible future non-violent cooperation and co-existence with all creatures on Earth. The foundation of the peace work that is developed here lies in a "universal state of being", i.e. the re-connection with the higher order and the sacred powers of Creation.
In one way or another, all students are working for the establishment of functioning human communities, for it is only in alive communities that the knowledge of peace that we need today can arise. Only those who are able to live in community are in a position to see the solutions for the current social, sexual, spiritual, and ecological problems of our time. An autonomous individual, who is able to create a life for him/herself that is free of fear, is not a private, but a "communitarian" being. All existence is of a communitarian nature, all developments occur in community, all evolution is co-evolution. The prerequisites for healthy co-evolution are perception and trust. - In this way the development of theory on the one hand and of life practice on the other come full circle.
The main topics in the training program of the Mirja School are therefore:

3.
The re-integration of human life into the cosmic whole requires overcoming deep-seated fears that have accumulated throughout history. If we wish to overcome the worldwide chain of violence and fear we must first overcome it in ourselves. During dramatic regression trances the group participants experience -- sometimes as perpetrators, sometimes as victims -- the extent to which we are all entangled in this historical chain of fear and violence, and what consequences this has for our current lives. The deepest entanglements lie in the sexual area. It is here that the patriarchal era of the last 5,000 years have used the most brutal methods to establish fear and violence as tools of power - first against women, then against all those who are seen as being "inferior" or "unruly", or against "sinners". It was only a few hundred years ago that the men of the church began to seriously exterminate the female sex through witch-hunts and the Inquisition. Add to that the brutal anti-male slogans with which modern feminism struck back, and we sense the difficulty of the heritage that we all - men and women - are faced with in the sexual area. In all male religions and states the suppression or trivialization of sexuality has become the number one tool of domination. This is also the prerequisite for the unbridled consumerism which is consuming our children, our nature, and our planet. This is why the healing of the human being and of the Earth is possible only if we succeed in healing sexuality and in restoring the sexual energies to their sacred order. A new culture is rooted in a new relationship between the sexes.
Here in the sexual area we find the most dramatic derailment in the development of the patriarchal society. This derailment is reflected in the false or one-sided concepts of life, of progress, and of human civilization, including the social and ecological reform measures. The proposed concepts are almost always a subtle continuation of the existing culture of violence. They do not respect the fact that healing has to do with a reintegration into the sacredness of existence, and that mental-spiritual healing can succeed only if it is connected to a healing of the senses.
These are not empty words; they are serious requirements that we place on our own work. The communities of the future will either have solved the sexual issues - or else they will not exist. Religion and Eros were the sources of our existence. We need a new concept for both, so that they can be restored to being it again.

In this sense the Mirja School is an "exoteric" mystery school, wherein ancient knowledge is combined with the requirements of a new cultural era. At its core we find the transformation of violence, the re-connection with the sacred powers of Creation and the re-discovery of our Gaia-Earth as a unified, spiritual and conscious living body. The individual learning steps are often accompanied by unusual contacts with animals. Animals are aspects of Gaia's Spirit and they are seeking to cooperate with us. This viewpoint automatically results in an aware, caring, and vegetarian way of life.

4.
A central area of study at the Mirja School is the establishment of functioning communities. Here we need entirely new concepts. None of the old concepts of leaders and followers, affiliation and exclusion, collectivism and uniformity, inner cohesion through outer enemies, etc. can fulfill the needs of a non-violent human co-existence that is free of fear. The newer concepts of "authoritarianism" vs. "anti-authoritarianism", "centralization" vs. "decentralization", "hierarchy" vs. "grass-roots democracy" do not yield much when attempting to establish positive sustainable foundations for a new type of trust among human beings. It is obvious that the new communities are grass-root democracies, but what inner qualities of truth, of responsibility, and of communitarian ethics must a community develop, in order to be able to truly behave like a grass-roots democracy? The communities of the last 30 years did not fail due to outer enemies; they failed because of inner conflicts and rivalries. If we want to survive the ecological and social crises that we have brought forth, then we are forced to enter into a totally new and dramatic community experiment. First of all we need to establish community among humans, secondly community with all living beings and third, although it may sound strange, community with the spiritual forces of the Universe.

"To be at a higher level of being means to be in a more encompassing union" said Teilhard de Chardin, who studied the higher and more stable order of life. The basis for a functioning human community is trust. Trust is a result of truth, of mutual support, and of the transparency of events, especially transparency about existing power structures, decision-making structures and sexual structures. We can find some good models for human community in the fields of holography and chaos research. Community life in nature has arranged itself as a non-linear, open, very complex system. By studying such systems we find the necessary parameters for functionality, survivability and growth potential of human communities. They are all the result of the connection and compatibility with the next higher structures in Creation.
This higher compatibility with the universal order enables a process to occur, which is determinant for the further evolution of humankind: the blocked energies, that were constantly discharged "downward" from the old systems, resulting in destruction and wars, can now "move upwards" and can have an effect on a higher level of order. The ordering principle of chaotic life forces is no longer below, but above the ordering structures of societies to date. The desired stability no longer excludes our elementary driving forces, but expressly includes them. This eliminates the disastrous moral ambiguity that human society had to live with for thousands of years. These are the connections that will be thought through and developed in a variety of ways at the Mirja School.
One can see why a certain amount of elementary theoretical studies need to be a part of any developmental program for the new centers. What is being developed here is not just more academic knowledge, but new knowledge in terms of a new overall orientation: a new kind of general course of studies. The participants of a 3-month course come together to create a small community, within which the new principles can be understood and tested. The research work in the Mirja School is therefore always connected to concrete personal experiences.
"Only tribes will survive". This statement by a Native American leader (Vine Deloria Jr.) may be somewhat exaggerated, but it does put its finger on the heart of the matter, provided we do not associate "tribes" with cave dwellers, but with highly conscious crystallization points within post-capitalist humanity.

5.
An essential part of the training consists of "working on yourself". We can only achieve as much outer peace as we have achieved inner peace. The conflicts that we experience in the outer world are reflections of the potentials of conflict that we -- being a part of history and a part of humanity - carry in ourselves. This is true about the prevailing perpetrator-victim structures, which are deeply rooted in us and in our karmic history. We meet our enemies from the past as friends and vice versa. Things repeat themselves until they are solved. We must solve them, in order to avoid further chain reactions. The solution begins with us. We must take farewell of the many games that the ego in its isolation has learned to play, and of the dearly held habits of blackmail, of protest and of being offended. If we want to enter the functional circle of a stable community we must learn to get rid of our deep-seated fears, our swindling, our bragging, etc. If we want to integrate ourselves into the higher functional circle of trust and human solidarity we must say goodbye to our thoughts of hatred and revenge, condemnation and defamation. For the professional co-workers the issues usually concern releasing deeply stored fear and anger that has stood in the way of their empowerment and their love lives. Love relationships are beloved arenas for private bottlenecks and conflicts. Two lovers can never on their own correct what many generations before them have created. The historically based compulsion to pretend and to suppress oneself has inflicted too many wounds and has resulted in too many fears of separation, for two people to be able to cope with them alone. Yet there can be no peace on earth, so long as there is war in love. The students learn what it means not to see these conflicts as private conflicts but as a part of an historical issue that affects more or less all of us. Whoever solves his or her conflict is doing this work on behalf of everyone else and is therefore doing a service for peace. This is a wholly different view of one's so-called "private problems". This makes it possible for peace workers to no longer have to hide themselves from others.
The work on changing oneself is supported by the group. The Mirja School has developed various methods for this. They range from various methods of self-expression in front of the group to healing trances and regressions. Special places and lodgings are provided by the Political Ashram for all peace workers, who temporarily need an inner sanctuary to deal with themselves and with their world.
The coming transformation requires a high degree of transparency and openness and it requires a cleansing of the soul and the body. A continuous training camp (including a sports gym) is being planned, in which the mental, emotional, and bodily energies can be cared for and increased as part of the basic training. We know that we will get help from the universe if we are prepared to receive it. "Not out of one's own power" is therefore a motto of the emerging spiritual life practice.

6.
The mental-spiritual framework of our work is the POLITICAL THEORY. It is the theory of healing biotopes and how they can multiply on earth. It describes, in theoretical categories, the creation of a new planetary culture. The concepts of "morphogenetic fields" and "morphic resonance", which were developed by Rupert Sheldrake, are valid not only for the creation of new patterns of behavior in nature, but also for establishing new human systems. New systems of ecology, new social systems, and new intellectual systems are established through the creation of fields, if they are aligned with a latent developmental direction for the whole.
The world is a unified whole. Everything in the universe is of a spiritual nature and reflects the whole. Here we are not following Newton's physical worldview, but rather that of Giordano Bruno. The forces and the order of the whole impact each of its parts. Even in distorted and broken images the whole can still be perceived, just as it can in holographic film. It can be seen again through the correct perceptional attitude (in holography referred to as the "reference beam"). What we see when we focus our minds on the undisturbed whole, we in the Mirja School call the "prehistoric utopia", the "dream" or the "entelechy" of things. The students practice this perceptional attitude in their daily experiences with fellow human beings, animals, plants, myths, religions, and communities, and in the study of history. History, too, follows "the whole" and carries in it the seed of the whole as a "prehistoric utopia". It consists of the concrete possibility, that Ernst Block called "utopian latency" or "Nondum". Since we are the eyes of the whole, we have the possibility of seeing and recognizing this prehistoric utopia. This makes it possible for us to tentatively realize it at certain chosen locations. We call such locations "healing biotopes". If the information for peace, which is developed there, is aligned with the whole, then an immediate field effect takes effect: it has an impact everywhere. It impacts the organism of the biosphere just like medicine does in the organism of the human being. It impacts the energy system of the world like a correctly place acupuncture needle in the energy system of the body. This "law of fields" applies to the evolution of life on earth and to the evolution of the human being and human community, and it is the basic thought behind the political theory. In order to heal the overall organism of the biosphere we do not need to treat all its parts. It is enough to introduce a "medicine" with the right content at the right place, in order to introduce a healing power into the whole. The task then becomes one of establishing healing biotopes in which a comprehensive set of information regarding non-violence, co-evolution, and trust is developed in real life. Once this information has reached a certain level of maturity and if it corresponds to the immanent building plans of Creation, it has an impact in terms of morphogenetic field creation. Similar healing biotopes will then appear at other places on earth.
The healing biotopes that are being established globally constitute the seeds of crystallization of the new era. A network of planetary healing biotopes organizes itself into a pattern for a new planetary community of all living beings.

People who are actively working with youths, the environment, the protection of animals, human rights, etc. (including committed resistance fighters) and who seek a greater goal for their commitment, are warmly invited to get to know our work.

The Mirja School is firmly connected to various parts of Tamera: to the "Institute for Global Peace Work" (IGP), to the Political Ashram, and to the Art Center (Café Tesla), in which new approaches to perception and creation are practiced through the medium of art. Art plays a great role in our work, since it liberates creative forces that are intimately connected to the healing process. In addition to the professional training in the Mirja School there is the "Youth School for Global Learning (German acronym: JGL). This school coordinates the youth work of different centers, it organizes extensive journeys and contacts peace-loving tribes, international peace projects, projects for the protection of animals, and environmental groups. The young participants gain knowledge about the global situation of life on our planet and about the possibilities for change.

I ask that the continued establishment of the Mirja School and of the Institute for Global Peace Work be supported with material and financial resources.

Dieter Duhm
Tamera, February 2000

More informationen about Tamera:

www.tamera.org