Keeping our violence in check

Take the violent world. In it, we always try to get what we want. We bend the rules and hope we can fix things up later. But there’s another violent world in Nature, where forceful events like storms, epidemics and earthquakes happen and destruction occurs on a massive scale. But this sort of violence isn’t the same as the human variety. Ours is damaging because it is so coldly administered - driven by our sense of insecurity and ambition. Only by implementing the principles of non-violence can we keep our own violence in check, whether it’s our own violence or it’s in our children, in our partner or in the collective consciousness itself. By checking ourselves and our closest relationships for violence, we can keep non-violent principles in touch with reality. Then we can watch it grow, probably first at home, in a relatively safe atmosphere.
At home we can test and trial non-violence before taking it into the outside world. At home, between familiar people, where we’re known, we can learn valuable lessons via praise, mockery and criticism. The impact on our ego may be softened by our intimacy with people who know us. And with them we can work through our differences, perhaps more slowly than we’d like but more thoroughly. Hopefully at home we can watch out for each other, test each other and have as our basis an implicit promise that we’ll never leave each other behind. That building of mutual care leads to a feeling of safety, and that can give us enough confidence to go into the outside world with strangers and be more truthful in our communications with them … which includes the vilified public figures whom we love to hate. It would be good training in non-violence if we could observe what they do without automatically aborting on them or bringing out the hate bugs to hurt them. Non-violence is strengthened when we stop being so predictably judgmental!!