The Intent to Harm: Understanding the Roots of Violence and Inner Conflict

The intent to cause harm is what violence basically is, is it not? The question becomes, how does one intelligently deal with or respond to violence (regardless if it is coming from within yourself or outside of yourself)?

I’ve been in quite a number of threatening situations over the years, and I could see how my mind was the key to the outcome of the situation. At first it may not seem like you are attacking yourself whenever you try to ‘force’ out thoughts or feelings that you’d rather not have. But that is exactly what is happening — one part of myself is opposing another part of itself. I consider this to be the zygote of violence, or the conception of it. And just as a zygote may not appear to be a human being, it later develops fully into a recognizable person. Similarly— internal conflict of one state of mind taking over and changing it into a more desirable state of mind—is the self attacking itself.

But what has this to do with someone who is actively trying to injure you? What does your internal state of affairs have to do with what he/she intends do to you? Everything. When my ex-husband wanted to throw my kids and I out into the streets, because he was angry that things between us had ended, I had to deal with his multitude of threats and verbal assaults by first facing my own desire to do harm to him in return.

It became clear to me that any time that I would try to retaliate, the tension and fury would escalate to the point of violence erupting. But whenever I saw that reacting to cruelty with cruelty only generated more danger toward my kids and I, I had to back off and just observe all of these harshly unpleasant thoughts/ feelings.

As a result of doing this for a while, I was able to end our relationship and go on with our lives without any further interference from him. I could see that he still wanted to attack us and that he was very angry that he could not do it. I had disabled the element that made it possible for him to carry out his deep desire to harm us.

How did I do it? The analogy of a heat-seeking missile comes to mind. The exhaust from the targeted missile is what the heat-seeking missile locks onto, and it will trail that exhaust until it ultimately smashes into it and explodes. Similarly, the internal/ mental exhaust coming from my own state of mind, is what my husband’s mind was depending on for him to be able to explode on me. As long as I was not creating inward friction, he had no exhaust to lock onto. The only exhaust there was was his own, and that meant that he was going to attack himself. He could not succeed in getting me to repress or subjugate my own horrible feelings though he tried.

(Through false accusations, condemnations, domineering conduct, etc.)

I began to realize that thought is a totally dependent entity that relies upon its target to be in internal conflict in order for it to be able to successfully harm its intended person. I found out, through observing this in many other confrontational scenarios, that any movement to harm someone who is not harming themselves psychologically, the assailant ultimately ends up in a great deal of pain, instead. I have witnessed a lot of terrible things happen to people who have tried to destroy me, and it always backfired whenever I faced my own state of mind without reacting to it by retaliating against the taunter.

If you will examine very closely the battles between people, you will find that all the people involved in a confrontation are in conflict internally. Whenever a person relies on any image, belief, opinion, idea or dogma in an effort to deflect their fears, or to make themselves feel less insecure and more noble, then one is in opposition to one’s own self.

When an aggressor comes along and hurts you, you may appear to be “peacefully” praying, meditating or worshiping some symbol, but that is the essence of conflict, of violence. And violence begets violence. So one is not so innocent as one may first think.

The truly innocent is the person who does not oppose any state of mind in his/her self. And I have seen that any time I’m faced with someone who intends to hurt me in some manner, I realize that I am the one who determines my fate by how I deal with my state of mind that the aggressor triggers in me. I can’t stop him or her from stimulating painful feelings or thoughts, but I don’t have to be a slave to them or blindly attack the one who made me feel those things. I understand that the person who stimulated these things, desires me to retaliate so that he/she will have a ‘green light’ to commit violence on my physical security.

Once you see that the whole motive in angering a person is to get that person to run away from a distressing state of mind that the aggressor initiated, then you naturally don’t play along, because you can see that you will be at a disadvantage in the long run. It becomes obvious that my physical well-being is attacked or not attacked based upon whether or not I’m opposing my own inward disturbances.

What makes people intend to do harm is initially that people have to hide from inward pain by displacing what they feel about themselves onto others. Then they pretend that if they could only get rid of those people or make them suffer, they will be better off. So violence is an inadequate attempt to deal with internal insecurity, weakness, mediocrity, etc. through scapegoating one’s fellow man. It’s a vicious cycle that never ends, simply because this pattern can do nothing but continue itself.

I saw this same desire in myself to hurt the person who made me feel awful. But if I were to do that, he would feel justified in reciprocating the pain, in turn. So I asked myself, “What would happen if I just observed my rage instead of acting upon it?” I tried it, and the outcome was freedom without a bloodbath, in the end.

This is just one example I have shared with you. But all of the other similar confrontations from various people who are in a great deal of psychological pain were handled in the same manner.

And their threats concluded without violence upon me, but it ended in destruction to their physical security. I began these studies in 1977 and continue to see that the ending of violence out there begins at its source in here, within the mind.

You could say that’s great for you, but what about the rest of the world—how can this end violence in society? I would have to say that since our consciousness is basically the essence of mankind, when one ends violence within from moment to moment, then this will have a benevolent impact upon the overall direction of mankind. But the part of humanity that persists in functioning like a virus is doomed to decay and eventually wither away. In other words, it is unknowingly disposing of itself. All that will remain is the part of humanity that has divorced itself from that rotting process and survived as an intelligently evolved integral creature of mother nature.