Conquering Hate And Violence

11 November 2001, 12:02am IST
S H VENKATRAMANI.

Mankind is in the paranoiac grip of the complete havoc that violence has wreaked. can there be a more graphic testimony to the gruesome orgy of hate than the macabre visuals that flooded our television screens on september 11? whoever the terrorist guilty of hatching this venomous plan, it is the burgeoning embryo of hate in the human mind that has ballooned into this eerie plot of diabolical violence. no amount of fortification, police security and physical vigilance can protect humanity from these mindless acts of violence that manifest hate and anger. vigilance and force can pre-empt and suppress acts of violence, but they cannot ensure that the demon of violence, springing up from hate and anger, does not rear its ugly head in a remote cranny of the mind. indeed, like a sleeping ulcer or an internal injury, it may silently gnaw away at the very core of the human mind. for three-quarters of a century men have used chlorofluorocarbons (cfcs) for air-conditioning and refrigeration. to the best of our knowledge and scientific wisdom we believed that these cfcs were benign. but now, to our horror, we have discovered that while the chlorine in the cfcs proved to be very stable in the immediate vicinity of the earth’s surface, not reacting deleteriously with any of the gases that constitute the air, it has quietly drilled a gaping hole in the health-giving ozone layer enveloping the earth’s atmosphere. that is why the montreal protocol envisages the phasing out of all cfcs. if we physically control and suppress violence, the hatred in the soul that we are not allowing to manifest itself, will, like these cfcs, slowly and imperceptibly eat into the vitals of the ozone layer of the human mind. if you prevent hate from manifesting itself, you will drive it deeper and wider into the system till one day it explodes in an uncontrollable holocaust of intolerant violence. to tackle the issue of violence in human society, we need to fundamentally address the source of violence, intolerance and hatred in our own minds. it is the anger, hate and violence in the microcosm of our mind that gets magnified and manifests itself as international terrorism on the macrocosm of the world. philosopher jiddu krishnamurti percipiently observed that “war can only be understood and put an end to if you and all those who are concerned very deeply with the survival of man, feel that you are utterly responsible for killing others”. as the poet francis thompson has written evocatively: “all things by hidden power / to each other linked are, / that thou canst not stir a flower / without the troubling of a star”. modern physics has made it abundantly clear that the universe is not a mechanical jigsaw and a physical configuration that can be dismantled, pieced together, reassembled and understood. so we cannot dismantle the human mindset, remove hate and violence, and reconfigure it again. the cartesian mechanistic paradigm is passe. the whole is no longer the sum of the parts. in fact, the whole is contained in each one of its parts. so what is the source of this hate in our minds? hate can spontaneously well up as an impulsive feeling in the mind. all such spontaneous impulses are the result of your having been conditioned by your own past sensory experiences. a feeling of hatred can also arise from evaluation and judgment based on your own subconscious but subtly obtrusive ego. the ego intangibly manifests itself as your deeply embedded likes and dislikes. the liking gains in fervour through experience imbibed through your own jaundiced perspective; and gradually looms into fanaticism. your dislikes similarly snowball into intense hatred. so it is the maya of the self that divides the world into one’s own self and the other, comes with attendant emotional baggage, and sows the seeds of violence and war in the human mind. krishnamurti pertinently asks: “why is there this division between man and man, between race and race, culture against culture, one series of ideologies against another? why? why is there this separation?’’ the illusory sense of the self provides a comforting cocoon of a system of beliefs and faith. this cocoon of beliefs fortifying the self incubates the pupa of hate. suddenly and unpredictably, a volcano of violence erupts from the cocoon. when you perceive this clearly, not as words or a concept, but like the blistering heat of fire on your skin, you will transcend hate from the innermost depths of your being.