Gandhian scholar, founder of the Metta Center for Nonviolence, and professor who has spent nearly nine decades showing that the mirror Gandhi held up to humanity remains unshattered.

When Gandhi was assassinated in 1948, a young Michael Nagler saw photographs of the funeral procession—millions of grief-stricken faces. Years later, he read that an American journalist in that crowd had asked an Indian friend what was happening. The answer stayed with him: "The people feel that there was a mirror in the Mahatma that reflected the best that we are capable of. And now they fear that mirror has been shattered."

"My life's work," Nagler says, "has been to glue the shards of that mirror back together, and show that everything Gandhi did and said is available to us."

Nagler's path to nonviolence began, he admits with a laugh, partly because he was "the shortest kid in public school 193—I was very much in favor of everybody else being nonviolent." But the deeper roots ran through his family. When he was unkind to siblings or lesser creatures, he could see the pain in his parents' faces. "That made a big impact on me."

"I just believe that all life is sacred. We didn't give it, we can't take it."

When Nagler was being coached to appeal to the draft board as a conscientious objector, lacking any religious affiliation to justify his position, his coach suddenly sat back in astonishment. "You're the real thing," the man said. "Everybody else had to make up some reason because they really just wanted to save their skin. But you have this gut-level objection to violence." Where did it come from? "God implanted it in me," Nagler reflects, "and I've been trying to be faithful to it."

For decades, meditation has been his anchor. He practices passage meditation, memorizing sacred texts and moving through them silently. "It sounds very simple. It's actually excruciatingly difficult." Yet the practice yields something essential: "A very deep sense of unity with all that lives—the realest thing a human being can experience."

"Nonviolence emerges from an awareness of unity. The more we are aware of our deep-level connectedness with other beings, human or otherwise, the more we will spontaneously be nonviolent toward them. As the Bhagavad Gita says: when we become aware that we are others and others are us, how can self injure self?"

The breakthrough came during a difficult interaction when Nagler found himself getting angry. He managed to convert that anger into compassion, and suddenly it flashed on him: "This is what I do a hundred times a week in meditation." The realization transformed his understanding. "Anger is a distraction. Fear is a distraction. Our inner being is one of love and unity. When we depart from that, we're getting off the real."

Nagler draws a crucial distinction between strategic and principled nonviolence. He recalls protesters in Yemen saying, "They will not defeat us because we left our weapons at home." That's strategic nonviolence—already a breakthrough. But principled nonviolence goes deeper: "They can't defeat us because we have left our hatred at home."

The power of this approach, Nagler insists, works even against the most brutal regimes. When asked whether nonviolence could have worked against Hitler, he points to the Rosenstrasse Prison Uprising of 1943. When Hitler ordered the arrest of Jewish men married to non-Jewish women, their wives and mothers spontaneously converged on the prison. The Gestapo headquarters was two blocks away. "They could have dispersed that crowd in a second. They released the men." The one time Germans resisted at any scale, it worked.

"No nonviolent act is ever wasted. You just need to be able to connect the dots. When you hold up that mirror of nonviolence, you are changing people—maybe not to where you'd notice it. But somewhere down the line, it will show up."

What troubles Nagler most is how advertising and media promote a degraded image of human nature—convincing us we're lacking something they can sell. "The recognition of the inner power and glory in every human being puts us 180 degrees opposed to that." Gandhi said anyone could do what he did. "We need to make people aware of the infinite power that really is within us."

He tells of a U.S. Marine stationed in Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami, assigned to hand out blankets and food. Asked how it felt doing work he wasn't trained for, the sergeant replied: "I have been serving my country for 34 years. And this is the only day that I got any satisfaction out of it."

"That shows what we really are," Nagler says. "My goal for humanity going forward is to have thirty-four years of satisfaction, and maybe one day of misery—just to remember what it was like."