Pancho Ramos Stierle meditating as he is arrested at Occupy Oakland, 2011. Photo courtesy of Occupy Online

When Occupy activists in Oakland, California learned that police were planning to raid their encampment on November 14, 2011, people immediately began to talk about what they would do to resist the invasion of their ad hoc community. Fear and anger mounted.

One man, Pancho Ramos Stierle, took a contrary approach. "If police are stepping up their violence," he said, "we need to step up our nonviolence."

At 6:30 in the morning on the designated day, the police arrived in riot gear, armed with pepper spray and rubber bullets. But instead of angry protestors, they encountered... meditators. Pancho and 32 other people were sitting quietly on the street and meditating.

The police carried out their orders to arrest people, but what the photos showed were smiling people at peace with what everything that was happening. Pancho, a former graduate student who had been studying astrophysics at U. Cal. Berkeley until a conversation with a janitor changed his life, said later: "It is time for the spiritual people to get active and the activist people to get spiritual so that we can have total revolution of the human spirit."