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Summer 1995
NAMASTE,
With the news full of stories about bombings, mass murders, militias, militant religious extremists of all stripes spouting hatred and distrust, and tales of assorted horrors perpetrated by a sweeping spectrum of kooks, krazies, and bad guys in general, one could be forgiven for wondering if we should be spending our time standing on our heads. Maybe we should, I don’t know, DO something!
Of course what to do is the question.
Well, as my friend and colleague Shelly Greenberg says: “Whatever the question….the answer is … more yoga.”
Huh?
Maybe that answer makes more sense if we bear in mind that yoga is really much broader in its scope than standing on our heads. Although most of us initially become acquainted with yoga by learning yoga postures (asanas), the classical approach to the practice of yoga as delineated by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutra doesn’t start with asanas. It begins with five ethical principles called yama. The first and most important of these is ahimsa, which is generally translated as nonviolence. Like the other principles of yama, it is not a commandment; it doesn’t say “Don’t be violent.” What the sutra actually says is that when the practitioner is firmly established in nonviolence, hostility in his presence is abandoned, which is to say that when we ourselves are nonviolent, violence will not take place around us.
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As he does throughout the sutras, Patanjali in this sutra has cut straight to the core of the matter. The problem of violence lies not somewhere outside us. It is within us. It is we who are violent. If we were not, violence would not occur around us, if we are to believe the Yoga Sutra.
Hey! Whoa! Wait a minute. I didn’t blow up any buildings. What do I have to do with that? Looks like it was those weird militia dudes. But not me. I sure don’t have anything to do with any of those wackos. And besides, I’m a nonviolent person anyway.
But how many of us are truly nonviolent in the deepest sense, as Patanjali surely means it: nonviolent in thought and word as well as deed? No doubt there are degrees of violence. Blowing up a building is clearly of another order from shouting at the guy who cuts you off in traffic, which is obviously different from keeping your mouth shut but wanting to ram your car into his. Yet if we define violence in this broadest sense, although of different degrees, these are all acts of violence. In that light I think we’ll have to admit that we are not completely nonviolent people. I suspect such folk are few and far between.
So how are we to become nonviolent? How do we “do” nonviolence?
Well, it doesn’t seem to me that we can do nonviolence; we can only be nonviolent.
Alright then, how do we be nonviolent?
I don’t think it is by trying to not do violent acts or not say violent words or not think violent thoughts, although each of these is certainly worthwhile. No doubt we could whittle away a lot of the violence in our lives, in our culture, in the world by so doing. But I don’t think that approach will get to the root of violence. It would be like pruning the leaves of a creeping vine but leaving the root untouched. The leaves will eventually grow back.
The root of violence, it seems to me, lies in our inability to experience our connectedness – to other people, other creatures, our environment, the planet, the cosmos, the Great Spirit. We are much less likely to do violence to those whom we truly hold in our hearts. I think if we observe carefully, when we do harm even to those we love, we have, at least for the moment and for whatever reason, put them out of our hearts.
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I was listening to NPR the other day and heard an interview with the writer, W.D. Snodgrass, about something he wrote called, as I recollect, The Fuehrer’s Bunker. I’ve tried to find it but have been unable. I gathered from the discussion, however, that it was written from Hitler’s perspective. Snodgrass, in his wonderfully gravelly voice, said that he had received a tremendous amount of very angry mail. One person he recalled had asked how he could “glorify” someone so despicable as Hitler. He said that he later heard from the same person who expressed the same sentiment, except that the word “glorify” had been changed to “humanize”. Snodgrass said that that was the point. Hitler was human, just as we are humans.
I was reminded of a poem, Please Call Me by My True Names, by Thich Nhat Hanh, the well-known Vietnamese Zen master. Because of space considerations I reprint only part of it.
Do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive....
I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope,
the rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that are alive...
I am a frog swimming happily in the clear
water of a pond,
And I am the grass-snake, who, approaching
in silence, feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
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And I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda.
I am the twelve year old girl, refugee on
a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate,
And I am the pirate, my heart not yet
capable of seeing and loving...
Please call me by my true names,
So I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
So I can see that my joy and pain are one.
Please call me by my true names
So I can wake up and so the door of my heart
can be left open
The door of compassion.
When we demonize others, try to make them something other than human, other than us, in so doing we deny a part of ourselves. We not only disconnect from them, we disconnect from parts of ourselves. We do it with words like “kooks” and “wackos”, “thugs” and “fundamentalists”, “good guys” and “bad guys”. We do it by closing our eyes and our hearts to the pain and suffering of those near to us and not so near. We do it because to be related is painful. But to be related is also to be joyful. To feel unrelated, disconnected is a deeper pain; there is no joy in it anywhere, only a living death.
To try to turn another person or group of people into monsters or demons is to demonize ourselves. To declare that they are not a part of us is to try to cut off a part of ourselves. To put them out of our hearts is to deaden another little piece of our own hearts. This is the root of violence.
We are not unrelated. We are not separated. We are part of a vast jigsaw puzzle made up of countless pieces of varying sizes, shapes, and colors. Yet in spite of those differences, by all being pieces of the same puzzle, we are connected.
When we say “Namaste” to you at the end of class, that’s our way of acknowledging and honoring that place where we are connected, unified, where when you’re in yours and I’m in mine and we’re in the same place, we are One. That’s yoga. That’s why to the question of violence, to whatever the question…the answer is…more yoga.
Namaste,
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