two opposites dancing together

Non-violence has always seemed a bit passive, as if not effective enough to eliminate violence. But perhaps that’s the point – we shouldn’t want to kill off anything and that includes violence itself. Instead we should accept that one lives alongside the other. It’s the nature of the planet. Alongside disease there lives a healthy battle-worn immune system. The disease is the attacker, the other the defender. In the violence of nature, we experience a gale and see a stalk of wheat bending but not breaking in the wind. There is always a tension between opposites – it’s the nature of life on earth, but it’s also the push-me-pull-you of our own mental processes. Intelligence either preventing violence creeping in unnoticed or non-violence becoming too righteous. As observers, we should notice the nature of these two elements. Non-violence confronts and then withdraws. Violence confronts and gets out of control. Non-violence dances with violence - it lets the violence-based world make its impact (as it’s done so spectacularly up to now) then burn itself out, whereupon it steps in to take its place and makes a different sort of impact. At this point in time, after the violence of the twentieth century, we are struggling for something new; if we are still clinging to violence in any way, it’s because it was passed-down to us, as a way of getting things done; violence became routine. As we emerge from a dark century, we step into a new one in urgent need of non-violent solutions. Today, the ways of solving our problems by way of non-violence remain largely untested. So patience is needed to come to terms with non-violence with all its hidden powers and subtle approaches. If it is to be the modus operandi of our new age, we mustn’t run with it before we can walk with it. Meaning that we should make sure we can practice it before we preach it.