At the launch of the 2nd Wold March for Peace and Nonviolence in Madrid, on October 2nd, International Nonviolence Day that commemorates Gandhi’s birth, Rafael de la Rubia said:

“It should be said that this is not just a peripheral journey through the surface of the planet, through the surface of the earth. To this walking along roads, places, countries… you can add an internal journey, going through the depths of our existence, trying to match what we think with what we feel and with what we do, in order to be more coherent, gain more meaning in our lives and eliminate internal violence.”

To the millions of people who wonder how it could be possible to produce a profound transformation of the violent and dehumanising system in which we live we have been describing in a series of articles the need to add to structural social changes a Revolution of Consciousness. This increase in the level of consciousness is the main ingredient to be able to dismiss the Myth of Money, the prevailing value in neoliberal, competitive, individualistic and cruel capitalism, and build a human world based on compassion, solidarity, co-operation and meaning in life.

The call to coherence and internal unity based on thinking, feeling and acting in the same direction is the start of this road, away from the destructive contradictions sold to us by the system as “normal” existence, just as the World March took its first step on Km 0 in Plaza del Sol. 

Developing intentional coherence is not about obeying deities’ commandments or even laws, as we know very well many amoral acts were carried out in history and even today under the mantle of “legal” frameworks. We are talking here about paying attention to the registers of inner peace, agreement with oneself and internal growth that accompany the unity of thought, feeling and action, as opposed to the inner violence, confusion and enclosure which  is the common register to all forms of contradiction. This is a violence that does not stay in the individual but it gets projected into the social world causing unspeakable suffering.

Coherence can only be complete if it is accompanied by treating others also coherently, that is, treating them as we wish to be treated. This is the message of the World March: awakening two human revolutions, structural nonviolent social changes and an inner nonviolent transformation towards a higher level of existence.

The beginning of the March was celebrated in different points of the world

From Antonio Gancedo’s blog

Chile: the beginning of the 2 World March was announced in the National Parliament By the humanist parliamentarian Tomás Hirsch. And Santiago de Chile stretched with a “Hug for Nonviolence” as a dissemination of the 2 World March for Peace and Nonviolence.

From Seville and the Port of Santa Maria, in Spain to embark on the ferry journey to Tangier, Morocco the entry point of the WM in Africa where A Humanist Forum took place. In the Spanish cities of Seville and A Coruña, where the March was launched during a session in the Town Hall, different activities expressed the commitment to Peace and Nonviolence.

The World March in the Italian Parliament: The World March has among its objectives the dissemination of the culture of Peace and Non-Violence, disarmament – especially nuclear disarmament -, the defence of the environment and the enhancement of diversity. During the event “The beginning of the end of nuclear weapons” was projected, a work produced by the international press agency Pressenza on the occasion of the second anniversary of the approval of the UN Nuclear Disarmament Treaty (ICAN campaign, Nobel Prize of the Peace 2017). The documentary aims to contribute to the goal of reaching the end of the World March with the ratification of the TPAN by 50 countries to make it binding.

Brazil: From Pernambuco, Brazil, accompanying the launch of the 2ª World March the first “Live EAD”Live from Nonviolence in schools with 474 enrolled, 10 tutors in 20 states of Brazil, which connect on the website of the UFRPE (Federal Rural University of Pernambuco). A talk by Gunther Aleksander, of the Pressenza Agency, and Vinicius Pereira, of the Nonviolence in Schools Project, about the launch of the 2 World March for Peace and Nonviolence, giving the appropriate explanations on the free course of distance education for the formation of non-violence Centres in schools. Londrina also in Brazil connected with Peace and Nonviolence symbols.

Argentina: the documentary “The Beginning of the End of Nuclear Weapons” by director Alvaro Orus and producer Tony Robinson from Pressenza was shown in Cordoba. The film produced in the participants a very particular sensitivity that was expressed in the subsequent exchange. A campaign to collect signatures began to demand that the government of Argentina sign the treaty banning nuclear weapons and then ratify it.