Finding the Source of Violence Is Finding the Potential for Peace. 

Dear Friends,

Several years of research and reflection have brought me to an insight I would like to share with you. This insight may provide a new potential for peace because it deals with the root cause of violence. I’m hoping that you have the time to think about this, and to let me know what you think.

My insight is this. Human beings believe in a mistake. This mistake informs our language, our perceptions of reality, our own identities, and likewise our institutions and organizations. Further, believing in this mistake, without exception, leads to violence. The mistake is this: We accept that we are separate from each other and from nature until we acknowledge otherwise.

Accepting this concept of separation is contrary to the physical law of connection. The law of connection can be surmised from the axiomatic fact that there are no living individual entities on the planet that live divorced entirely from a relationship to other living entities or to the planet itself.  Nor can any one community be exempt from affecting others. All of what we do or do not do, including our very existence, affects the world around us. Therefore everything and everyone are already connected and in relationship with everything else. This is our ecological reality. All of this is one event.

However, when we take a look at the belief in separation, we soon realize that it is not a law of nature but a human idea. As the renowned physicist, David Bohm wrote in Wholeness and the Implicate Order:

"Being guided by a fragmentary self-world view, man acts in such a way as to break himself and his world up, so that all seems to correspond to his thinking.  Man thus obtains apparent proof of the correctness of his fragmentary self-world view . . . (However) he overlooks the fact that it is he himself . . . who has brought about the fragmentation that now seems to have an autonomous existence."

Separation is deeply rooted in our cultural story and world view, both of which define our reality. This story is something we generally accept without question.. As part of this story, it not only creates its own self-fulfilling prophecy as Bohm suggests, it also informs all of our other perceptions about reality. This means our perceptions about reality are being informed by a mistake.

How does this mistake lead to violence? Separation by definition enables us to believe that we choose our relationships, and conversely, that we do not have an important relationship to anyone (or anything) outside of our chosen circle.  Accepting this as true, we organize our thinking about people into those who are inside of our circle and those who are not. The result of this we’ve abbreviated into “Us” and “Them”.

The people in our circle are very important.  They help us to survive by helping us to meet physical, social and psychological needs. Without this circle we experience an overwhelming and unacceptable threat to survival. However, outsiders (from the point of view of separation) are not in a position of helping us meet these fundamental needs.  In short, since they don’t appear to be helping, we don’t think we need them, and since we don’t need them we don’t value them (or feel compelled to value them). Further, as nonmembers of our circle they inhabit a vague generic nondescript status in our minds. In fact, once we’ve labeled an individual or group as an “outsider” we have a hard time thinking about them as being real anymore. We may not even think about them as human beings.  This psychologically permits us to talk about them or take action against them as though they were only things. Clearly we make different decisions about things than we do about people. The core difference between them is that with things we no longer are tied to commonly recognized relational responsibilities such as the responsibility to respect the needs of other people. This mental ability to devalue and dehumanize others (triggered by the belief in separation) might be called the violence before the violence.

When a person’s value to me is less than those in my circle, it becomes psychologically reasonable that their needs inherently become secondary to my own. Or, turned around, my needs and the needs   of my circle come first and foremost - a rationalization that permits me to get those needs met at the expense those who are outside of my circle. The reflex to negate and then discriminate against “Them” is the first step in violence.

It is the means by which we maintain the both spoken and unspoken rationalizations we use to justify slavery, genocide, and war and, I think, most violence and injustice.  Martin Luther King Jr. was correct when he said the end is preexistent in the means.  Where separation prevails, violence also and inevitably prevails.

The belief in separation has been long identified as the source of suffering in our lives.  So, if we know this why haven’t we been able to use this knowledge to substantially change course? I think this is because even though we’ve known that separation leads to suffering we still believe that separation is an accurate description of reality. This led us to continually create an environment in which we expect, and thusly experience separation, and with it suffering and violence. In short, we’ve been stuck in a Catch 22 of our own making.  Another reason is that the mistake of separation is deeply rooted in a story we expect to be true. Who would expect to find a falsehood there?  

Finally, even though we may recognize that separation causes suffering, we’ve never systematically examined how to what degree it affects us – which, as it turns out, is substantial. Because the belief in separation contributes significantly to our definition of reality it filters virtually all our perceptions about ourselves and the world around us. It informs our beliefs, our preferences, identity, what choices we make, how we make them, how we define values, what we want, what we create, and how we relate to one another. And once we examine the implications of believing in separation we find that it’s impact is huge.

From what I can see, separation diminishes our identity, creativity and potential; it negatively impacts our health; it undermines our relationships, makes work environments less efficient, and cripples teamwork.  It influences our ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, and it enables us to judge others and to dismiss them or act against them, sometimes without even knowing that this is what we are doing. It colors our ideas of freedom and justice and limits them both.  It allows us to think of nature as a commodity and not a co-partner in this one event.  It also fools us into thinking that we are living in accord with the principle of loving our neighbor because it gives us the permission to decide who our neighbor is.

To borrow an analogy from Daniel Quinn’s book Ishmael, even though humankind is unaware of the law of connection, this does not spare us from the inevitable outcome of breaking the law – just as not understanding the laws of aerodynamics did not spare those first aviators from crashing. Until humankind can begin to think, speak, and act in terms of their collective connection, we will continue to be violent within our own selves, with each other, and with the planet.

However, if we know that the problem lies in a mistake (the belief in separation); if we know where the mistake resides (in our cultural story); and we if know that it that can be corrected (by paying attention to the law of connection), peace and justice can become sustainable possibilities.

I don’t think this requires a massive shift in consciousness. In fact, the funny thing is that we already know what to do to live in connection.  Our most important sacred texts around the world are pretty clear on this.  But I think the instructions on how follow these texts have been mentally cut and pasted into  patterns which almost always attempt to affirm the position of separation (and whatever perceived rights and values come from that) before we take action. This is how we can say that killing is wrong but war is OK.  However, from what I can see, the law of connection sets this straight.  It makes following our essential core values with everyone a practical matter because it serves our very wellbeing and survival to do so.
 
The more we learn about the impact of separation on our thinking and actions, the more we can find ways to live according to the law of connection.  Alternately, the more we experiment with the law of connection the more it becomes apparent (at least it’s become apparent to me) that this is how we were meant to be living.

My singular interest in writing this is to put it into your hands, and into the hands of the community of people working toward peace and justice - perhaps to experiment with, but also to begin a dialog.

 It is with this hope that I share these observations with you.  

Sincerely,

Denise M. Torres