Lifted with permission from Pete's description at http://PeterMerel.newsvine.com/_news/2008/08/07/1726681-satyagraha :
Satyagraha means ending tyranny. It means reclaiming our ability to govern ourselves, stand for ourselves, and trust in each other.
Tyranny is generated by millions of individual compromises on truth, peace and love. It is a positive feedback effect - like the howl of a speaker playing into its own microphone. Satyagraha is the only historically proven remedy for tyranny.
Satyagraha is not a cult, organization, or political party, but an uncompromising personal commitment. It is not a prayer to recite, but a way of working to improve the quality of your life and the lives around you.
Satyagraha is the discipline of self-control and self-sufficiency whereby Mohandas Gandhi threw the British empire out of India; Martin Luther King ended racial segregation in America; and Nelson Mandela surmounted the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Satyagraha conquers by conversion, producing neither defeat nor victory, but new harmony. It entails 11 great vows:
- Non-violence. Not harming your enemies but reaching out to them in forgiveness and hospitality. Non-cooperation with those who use violence and collaboration with those who do not.
- Strict adherence to Truth - this includes honesty, but goes beyond it to mean living actively in accord with what you know to be true. Rather than in wishful compromise.
- Non-stealing - not exploiting others and actively avoiding any practice or product that involves use of fear, violence, addiction or fraud.
- Ecological chastity - not raising children to live in poverty or animals to live in squalor. Working on the quality of all lives you create, consume or displace. Studying, adapting and propagating PermaCulture.
- Non-possession. Not the same as poverty, this means taking only what you need and providing the rest to benefit others in need. The opposite of waste, hoarding, and indulgence.
- Choosing to work only in efforts to improve the human dignity and mutual understanding of your fellow people. All other forms of work serve purposes of tyranny.
- Non-addiction. Freeing yourself from all personal dependencies including cigarettes, sugar, alcohol, caffeine, mass media and artificial foods. Addiction inevitably leads to compromise.
- Fearlessness - courage on all occasions. The solution to terrorism is refusing to act from fear. Acting constructively, mindfully, to own your own life.
- Equal respect for any religion or philosophy that observes the Golden Rule: "Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself".
- Initiating and participating in grass roots economic strategies such as small farm shares, boycotting franchise stores, open sourcing, mutual credit systems, and a determination to consume only local, ethically grown produce.
- Non-racism - not just tolerance, but working to combine foreign cultures fruitfully with your own. Adapting Satyagraha so that it can propagate with these.
Satyagraha isn't an easy thing to do. You can only make these vows live by consciously working on your own life.
As for software, what is a SatyaGrahaDevelopment method?
"The word Satya (Truth), is derived from Sat, which means being. And nothing is or exists in reality except Truth."
M.K. Gandhi, Young India, July 30 1931
"Truth (Satya) implies love, and firmness (Agraha) engenders and therefore serve as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement "Satyagraha", that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence, and gave up the use of the phrase "passive resistance".
M.K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa
Jonathan, you were referring to this, not the band "Satya Graha", right?
Satya Graha