The Goodness Field: A Guidebook for Proactive Nonviolence
The Goodness Field: A Guidebook for Proactive Nonviolence
By Bob Aldridge
Foreword by Jim Douglass
378 pages
©2020
A scientific 'field' is a region in which a force operates, and everything in the field is acted upon by that force. The goodness field, like the gravitational field, encompasses the entire Universe and acts upon everything in the Universe. One can oppose gravity by hanging on to something. Goodness can also be opposed. This tripartite Guidebook explores ways to recognize and overcome that opposition to Goodness.
The first step in any proactive nonviolent action or campaign is to positively identify and thoroughly understand the opponent. Every person has a self-serving ego (false self) and an inner goodness (true self). Therefore, a person cannot be our opponent if their true self is goodness. That leaves the false self, the ego, as our opponent. The ego's influence works through a thought process dubbed egothink. Part 1 of this Guidebook explores the development of egothink in society since World War II and how it controls the public mind through propaganda; how it has structured government to control the populace; how it garners support through division and deception; and how it has encapsulated all this in a culture of entertainment.
The next step is to achieve the 'higher unity' necessary for proactive nonviolence. That is, to formulate a Global Constructive Program which is a concise statement of the consensual nonviolent vision of what the world can be. It is not a list of issues. It engages all issues. Martin Luther King Jr longed for his organizational leaders to have a 'higher unity' under the overarching civil rights movement. Part II of this Guidebook addresses ways to unify the many issue-oriented nonviolence organizations in higher unity under an overarching Global Constructive Program.
Global Satyagraha then follows – a unified global movement to nonviolently remove the obstacles to goodness. There is a difference between reality and how it is perceived by the five senses. The Hindu tradition calls this perceived reality an illusion – a 'phenomenal world.'' As explained in Part III, evil is caused when egothink tries to change the real world to please the phenomenal world.
Indigenous people, following The Indigenous Way, are already globally unified in seeking respect for Mother Earth, her cycles and balances, and all that is sacred. They oppose the egothink notion that we own Mother Earth and can exploit her resources for our pleasure and profit. We are all part of one organism; we are all related. Nonviolent warriors transcend egothink by what Gandhi called selfpurification and self-rule (Swaraj) over our thinking, actions, and emotions. Nonviolent warriors will lead the way toward actualizing the vision of the Global Constructive Program. Once nonviolent warriors are united as a Global Satyagraha Movement, they will bring harmony to Earth. These aspects of proactive nonviolence are also explained in Part III.
The full book can also be read in pdf format here: The Goodness Field: A Guidebook for Proactive Nonviolence.
Also available on Kindle with text-to-speech: The Goodness Field azw3 file.
Directions: 1) Right-click on the asw3 file link above and select "save link/target as..." 2) In the popup dialog, select the location to save the file 3) Navigate to the downloaded file via a windows explorer type program 4) Drag the downloaded file to the 'Documents' folder of your Kindle via USB connection 5) The file will not retain its identity. It will appear on Kindle 'Home' screen as 826821.br.pdf 6) The Kindle 'Text-to-Speech' function will now work.
“Bob Aldridge’s powerful book, The Goodness Field: A Guidebook for Proactive Nonviolence points out the need and opportunity for a Global Satyagraha Movement – nonviolent, active, creative, and compassionate – to challenge the US addiction to power and greed which feeds our nation’s endless wars and empire. Aldridge gives some very helpful suggestions for how to build that movement. This is not a pipe dream. We, the world’s people can make it happen! ”
“Bob Aldridge’s The Goodness Field is a groundbreaking masterpiece that offers agents of change two powerful gifts. First, it sweeps away the stereotypes of nonviolence that see it as weak and limited. Nonviolence, on the contrary, is a force for goodness that pervades the entire universe. This goodness force – in the scientific sense of the four fundamental forces of nature – “is guiding evolution to make the Universe good for living,” a conclusion Aldridge works out using scientific data and logical deduction. His analysis reveals the universality of nonviolence and how its power is available to all of us.
This paradigm-shifting finding opens new and breath-taking vistas for those of us seeking a way forward. But Aldridge doesn’t stop there. His second gift is his call for us to take the goodness field seriously and join in building a “Global Constructive Program” and a “Global Satyagraha Movement” (borrowing Gandhi’s term, meaning “truth-force” or “soul-force”) to respond to a worldwide culture of violence, including the contemporary U.S. imperial order dominating the world through interlocking military, surveillance, economic and political systems, which he documents in painstaking detail. Nonviolence is the only way to overcome evil, an assertion that Aldridge illuminates through the book’s vivid case-studies of nonviolent resistance.
The fruit of a lifetime of nonviolent action and reflection—Aldridge himself dramatically turned toward the “goodness force” and changed his life forever after years as an engineer working on weapons systems—The Goodness Field invites us to re-imagine and activate nonviolence and its proactive power to resist and work to dismantle the systems that are accelerating the abysmal, existential crises facing our species and our planet.”
