“Opposing Forces” — Daily Metta

December 21:

“All religions teach that two opposing forces act upon us and the human endeavor consists in a series of eternal rejections and acceptances.”

—Gandhi (Letter to Tagore)

You get the impression sometimes that nonviolence, far from being the specialized subject way off in a corner visited only by oddball idealists, which is how many of us think of it, is on the contrary the subject every human being has to deal with if she or he is to grow spiritually (or emotionally, psychologically, if you prefer) not to mention make a meaningful contribution to the life around us.

There’s a proverb in Sanskrit that goes, “Lack of discrimination is the greatest of disasters.”  That’s because we need a keen sense of discrimination between these opposing forces that Augustine called ‘love of man (meaning oneself) and love of God’ and Jewish sages called simply yetsir ra ve yetsir tov, ‘the evil urge and the good urge.’  (Yes, he’s right that all religions teach it).  Without being able to discriminate between them — think of how many groups have convinced themselves that violence is good today — we become playthings of these forces instead of mastering them. Different traditions have come up with different names, as we see, but the handiest name for them in our world is — you guessed it —  violence and nonviolence.  Rather than abstractions like “good and evil,” this is the most helpful set of terms for the two forces that are, as Gandhi says, acting on us all the time — so we have to discriminate between them all the time.  No more boredom for us!

Experiment in nonviolence:
Think about Johan Galtung’s classic definition of violence as “any avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs.”  Can we use it to sharpen our discrimination between the two forces?