Non- Violence - An Introduction

As discussed in my earlier post related to the Astanga Sadhana, the first of these steps is Yama and within Yama there are some categories. In my last post, I had covered about the aspect of Truth. In this post, I will discuss about non-violence. I will briefly cover what is violence from a karmic or spiritual perspective, the types of violence and what is the final decision regarding violence.

Violence is defined by the World Health Organization as "the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, mal-development, or deprivation", although the group acknowledges that the inclusion of "the use of power" in its definition expands on the conventional understanding of the word.

Let us use our concept of identity to define different levels of violence. We as a living entity are composed of the physical layer consisting of the gross body; the subtle layer consisting of the mind and the intellect; the causal body consisting of the unfulfilled desires. So, violence can happen at all these levels.  When I use physical force against another, there is harm to the gross body level and potentially to the subtle layer which is a storehouse of emotions and intellect. When i verbally abuse a person, violence is at the subtle layer and not at the physical layer. Typically this violence is at the mind level or emotional level. If i do something to hurt the prestige or status of a person, the violence is at the intellect's level, since that is where the concept of the prestige, status etc. arise.

Now, that we have defined violence and the levels at which violence can occur, let's try and see if every act of "violence" is really violence from a spiritual or karmic perspective. We take this approach to help determine what are those acts which are sure to come back and hit us with an equal force at some point. Karma being an absolute impartial judge ensures that acts that are deemed violent karmically have to have a return impact at some point. To determine whether an act is violent, there are 2 questions to ask:

a. Was the intent to actually hurt or harm?

b. What was the reasoning behind the intent?

Let us say I am driving on the road in the dark and is very common here in USA, I hit a deer and it dies. Let us see if this was a violent act. Was my intent to cause harm? 

Obviously not ! On the face of it, since the first condition is not met, it does not appear to be a violent act and hence we need not go to the next question. Similarly, a surgeon operates on a patient cutting open his body and spilling blood. This also is very clear it is not an act of violence. 

Now, let us take a soldier fighting a war. He kills an enemy soldier. Was the intent to kill?  Absolutely ! Now, we go to the next question regarding the reason behind wanting to kill. Soldier A does not have any grudges against soldier B. He is fighting for his country and hence he has killed for a higher cause which is much beyond any selfish motive. So, this cannot be deemed as violence. Now, let s extend the same situation. After soldier A has killed soldier B, he goes into the town and kills the soldier B's family. Even though the soldier B's family is related to the enemy, there is absolutely no justification for killing them. Hence it is an act of violence.  Most of the above are clear cut cases and easy to determine whether the reason behind intent to harm was right or not. But in many cases, it may become difficult to determine this. For this we will have to fall back on our familiar model which I discussed in the previous post. 

The impetus for an action comes from the sense organs to the mind. The mind consults the intellect and accordingly tells the action organs what to do.  So long as the intellect is sharp and well trained and has positive impressions through study of scriptures, company of good people etc, it cannot give a wrong advice to the mind and on to the action organs. Only when the intellect is clouded by emotions, it is not in a position to give the right advice and the mind then decides to order the action organs based on emotions and in such situations, acts can be violent karmically. 

Suppose I desire something, say a car, a promotion or whatever and there is something or someone preventing me from getting what I desire, the mind which is full of desires wants to eliminate the person causing it from achieving its desires. However, so long as the intellect is reasonably active, it advises the mind against doing an action to eliminate the cause of the problem. But in many cases, including the mass shootings we see often, the mind is totally overcome by its desires and will do anything to eliminate the person blocking it from achieving its desires and violence results.

So the whole purpose of being non-violent as part of the Yama discipline of Astanga sadhana is to ensure that every action that we perform is under the control of a trained intellect. With such an approach, there is no karmic impact of an act and to that extent our storehouse of vasanas does not get further increased and this reduces our chances of a rebirth, which ultimately is the objective of spirituality and that is to get over rebirths with the realization that I am the Supreme or Life Principle and for me the return to bliss is the only objective of life.