Harmlessness

All of us have within us the capacity for irrational anger.  I say irrational, because the only rational use of anger is when you are actually under attack.  Often, though, we will be angry about one thing–one valid cause of anger–but wind up instead directing at someone or something else that has nothing to do with it.

I love babies, but for some weird reason I occasionally feel violent towards them.  I think it is because they are so small and innocent, and I was small and innocent once, and it got me hurt.  It’s a deep rooted psychological thing.

But all of us have a shadow side.  All of us are potentially capable of irrational violence, violence which appeases some inner demon.

Look at the success of the most recent “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”.  All I know of it is that they showed images on normal evening TV of a women bound and gagged, and a chainsaw poised to cut off her arm while she screamed.  This passes for “entertainment”: the solipsistic consumption of the pain of others.  For such people, some inner recess of their souls says that “what is out there, doesn’t matter”. They are alone inside.  Violence does that.

And the thing is in 3D.  Tell me this is not tweaking some young and impressionable minds.

I’m off topic. Ahimsa, to me–and I feel I’ve said this before, but I am not sure here–is the eradication both of pleasure in violence, and in irrational violence. The two are roughly the same thing, with the difference that I think all people are born prone to the second, and only eradicate it through constant vigilence.  I do not feel it need mean the eradication of violence outright.