Can We Live Without Violence?

Can You Describe Violence?

What is violence?

Violence is doing harm to others.
Violence is upset of balance.
Violence is an act driven by hate.
It is a negative feeling.

So a surgeon is committing violence?

If a surgeon stopped mid way, yes.
He is fixing what is wrong.
Or if the surgeon were doing it for sadistic pleasure.

They do extensive damage to an individuals flesh, maybe even psyche as they are discovering anaesthesia doesn’t work quite the way they assumed it did.

I think violence is an intent to harm. A surgeon hopefully has the intent to heal.

People do social violence as well, which can be much more damaging to the psyche.

I think mostly surgeons have the intent to do work, is that then violence? Many in the medical practice even disavow that they heal. They just help the natural process heal you.

Words can be violence as well as hitting.
Also, violence to the planet and eco-system.
Spreading a vicious lie about someone is social violence.

So can we describe violence in a concrete way? Point to a single conceptual thing?

Without our bodies miraculous power of self healing, surgery wouldn’t work…exercising wouldn’t either. There have been successful mock surgeries that worked just as well as if the person had actually had surgery. The person made a full recovery without incident.

How do we know when we have done violence?

There is damage but we don’t always notice the damage.
Things get out of balance.

When we walk we damage a great deal of life, have we done violence? When we breath we damage life, is that violence?

Perhaps “intent” is also required in order for it to be called ‘violent’. In what sense is intention required? A wilful act intending to do harm.

So there is no right or wrong answer here? I think we do have a very solid sense of what violence is, an instinctive sense of wrong. Ask a victim of recent violence, they will not feel it’s a gray area at all.

Maybe it’s just a will-full thing, minus intent. Nature is violent but it isn’t doing it to harm us.

As unambiguous as it seems to those who have experienced it, what is it they are referring to when they speak of ‘it’?

I have a very specific example that I would like to share. Last September, I put my beloved dog down. I killed him. This was a major ethical decision on my part. He was suffering; he was 14 years old; he hated to ride in the car, so I didn’t take him to the vet. I did it myself with equipment that I had originally purchased to use on myself. His demise was quick, not uncomfortable, and… I don’t know. Anyway that’s my example. It wasn’t violent.

I remember cutting myself with a knife by mistake. It sliced pretty deep and I was disturbed by the awareness of a deeper reality. It repeated on me for a few weeks.

You both have shared the key element of today’s class. More and more it’s being proven even to scientific satisfaction (as much as people still seem deeply invested in saying otherwise, saying things like nature is violent, that it is unfair) they are proving more and more commonly that animals do indeed have a sense of fairness. They do not respond to being struck a blow in the same way. Why would they differentiate at all? Isn’t receiving a blow the same regardless? Why would the dog accept a kick for quite some time, then later try to kill the human who kicks it?

Everyone has a different tolerance level.
Dogs accept hierarchy.

Tolerance has nothing to do with it. The same dog will maul someone else who kicks it. Is even more likely to do so, because they do not recognize that persons place or right to react to it negatively.

Primacy of Intent

What is still being vehemently denied by mainstream and materialistic thinkers, is the primacy of intent.

Intention is not something we create, something we arbitrarily arrive at. They are even proving that a virtual newborn, every young human baby, has a very sophisticated sense of intention which quickly blossoms into a sense of human interaction, and this sense of intention is learned how?

A sensing of some kind? They feel it? Perhaps the deepest sense. They feel it in their gut. In the core from which any later awareness emerges. Because we deny the reality of the web of intention, try to convince ourselves that everything depends on our point of view (which means it depends on how well we have rationalized things), we bend and warp those instinctive messages, mar and mutilate that form matrix from which a healthy and strong human mind was supposed to emerge. We alienate ourselves from each other and the natural world which serves as the foundation for our very existence, body and mind. There is nothing in your mind that has no basis in reality, no intention you can articulate that has no connection to the life web itself, and everything has its repercussions.

And there are subtleties to be considered. Actually, there are no subtleties. It’s the belief in subtleties that has lead us to this mess. Ask a frightened child how subtle their fear is. Ask the frightened pet how subtle their sense of their guardians behaviour is. These are not subtle.

Children and animals are almost by definition less subtle than adults.

Reason would be the subtlety. Internal dialogue is the thing they do not do.

My dog would leave the room when my parents had fights.

Reason is there, for sure, but so is refinement of sensibilities. The web of intention is not subtle, and the true will that was supposed to have come to fruition in that matrix, is not a subtle thing.

We rationalize to get subtlety.

I’ve caught myself saying to my husband that he has no reason to get angry, but I know that is a lie. Just like I have a reason to get upset too.

Despite humanities ability to distort, to muffle the signals of the life web, the ‘deeper reality’ spoken of… Perhaps I should describe that experience and see if it compares?

The deeper reality is more truthful? Yes.

Patterns of Denial

When my mental faculties fail me, my senses at first overwhelm me as they have lost all focus. Focus is a mind trick, a pattern of body language we have learned. My senses don’t go away, if anything they get louder. There is a sense of pulsation, deep profound feeling as if the world around me were beating like my own heart.

Another picture does assemble for me, if only briefly. Emotions get much louder, my own emotions as well as those of the people around me, but they don’t have the same meaning I would assign while I am busy thinking, trying to figure things out. If anything they are like features of that environmental heartbeat, sounds that all echo together. I experience my emotions and instincts like a deep synesthesia.

“Affective domain” as differing from “rational domain”? Yes, but it goes even deeper than that. There is a communication. It’s almost like thinking, but nothing so shallow. It’s more like looking at the assembled pattern of a birds nest, or an outgrowth of coral, and everything is seen with that as a backdrop, and everything does have meaning in the normal way, not in the thinking, story telling sort of way, more in a way that I have perhaps always understood but am ill equipped to bring to my normal consciousness.

I ponder whether our cognitive domains are actually analogous to collections of “bird nests” and “corals.”

It’s like in seeing this life I am seen by it. Is this making any sense or just too airy? Our cognitive states are more like strip mines, or furrows plowed in the earth. They ignore the living pattern.

It seems the “frames” are different. Neural networks? Neural networks are natural. The poisonous cocktail of cortisol and strange chemicals we build up, the aberrant signalling patterns that reflect nothing with any root in the grounding nature, these are unnatural. These are violent. Violence is denial.

I feel that having a perception of being perceived may be an extremely valuable capacity.

Resistance, or merely denial? Actually denial. Resistance is its own independent dynamic.

Consumption is a necessary part of the web of intention. Enacted in a synchronized way it serves to clear the path for a greater shared strength. Like an immune cell consuming other cells in your body, this is done to support the greater intention of life reflected in the body. The material is secondary, the intention is primary. Denial is rejection of intention. Resistance is selective intention although it’s often foolishly applied.

Might denial also be blindness? Blindness in what sense? Denying that something even exists? Denying global warming, for example. Natural blindness has it’s own place in the web of intention. Some species are blind as a rule. The tree has never seen a single thing. I think perhaps the distinction between blindness and denial is necessary. Blindness in the metaphorical sense is poorly used.

Pathways of information are shared. Any ecosystem is defined not by accident of chemistry or quirks of a misguided biological mechanism. Ecosystems are patterns of intention, webs of shared intention which is itself information. Is information anything other than intention? Can you have information without intention?

Who is doing that intending? No single being. Creation precedes agency, agency is the created thing. All product manifests as agency. There is no product independent of agency.

I expect it’s just noise without intention?

Isn’t intention a sort of framing of focus? Intention actually precedes focus, leads focus. It is what makes things have that attention getting quality we speak of, leads to what we call the experience of intuition.

The constraints of a beings nature, like being blind or sighted for example, are reflected in ecosystems, are manifestations of the web of intention, are not accidents against it, and in no way defy it.

So, the airplane pilot has intention to land on the runway and guides the plane accordingly. Intuition and intention are not synonymous or am I confused? And had that intention all along the pathway that lead them to become an airplane pilot to begin with. It was present in that persons individual temperament.

Intuition is the perception of intention. When you intuitively realize something, what you perceived was the emergence of that pattern in the background of intentional activity.

“Mindfulness”? Ultimately yes it is a state of mindfulness, though one that seems quite alien to most people, or at least rarefied.

And how is this related to violence? Violence is denial in the pattern of information that is intentions. Perceived through instinct and intuition, you encounter everything behaving according to it’s own nature. You either enter into a relationship with that…

I apologize for my thickness, I often needs things to be repeated. Everyone does, and it promotes memory for everyone also so it’s a fine thing for you to prompt me to do. I acknowledge and appreciate your intention, your nature as an individual, and value my relationship with that.

I would do you violence under what circumstance? What would it take for me to do you violence? Can you think of any?

For me it would be ejection from the sim for being cheeky. I could indeed do a form of violence that way, but what would it take for me to do that? What would make we motivated to do so?

You would have to feel threatened in some way.
Some reactive predisposition.
If I denied your role as teacher by talking too much? Or saying mean things to someone.

What leads to a predisposition? Does experience actually foster predisposition?

I don’t think anyone here talks too much. Nor do I. There isn’t a cap on how much you talk. I would only attempt to pursue the topic of the class despite divergence, and that only if it seemed necessary.

I guess it depends on how “pre” you mean. Some things are innate, others brought on by experience. No predisposition is brought on by experience. All predispositions are artifacts of so called thought. There is no experience that necessitates any specific interpretation, yet we interpret them anyway. Even the experience of pain doesn’t require a specific interpretation, and thus they have seen under fMRI that experienced mediators, though they report less intense pain, actually experience it more. What is less activated are those regions of the brain that gauge and interpret pain.

This may seem a little weird — but in my old age, I noticed my short-term memory sometimes fails me. However, if I physically perform the ‘bodily attitude’ that I was in when I originally experienced that thing I’ve forgotten, then sometimes it comes right back to me! This happened to me recently at the grocery store. It’s not at all strange. It’s entirely natural though little understood.

They have also established that the brain cannot distinguish between physical pain and social pain. They theorize that this may have served to support group cohesiveness, and thus promoted the survival of the individuals. As much as they insist it’s a mutation, an accident, this pattern is far too common even between species, too universal, to be something that just accidental occurred and then was bred into us. What do you think?

Violence is denial, and violence is provoked by patterns of denial, not by patterns of consumption. At worse, patterns of consumption promote indolence, apathy. They do not by themselves provoke violence.

In every case of a mass shooting, you hear reports of denial. They didn’t believe he would really do it. He didn’t seem like that kind of guy, and so on. They were just kids. He really seemed to love her. What are these statements? Factual assessments? Anything having concrete roots in reality?

Does this subject come from the recent mass shootings? No, though perhaps it does relate. It’s rooted much deeper though. It’s what’s leading to the chaos in Brazil, and in Syria and Iraq, and in the Ukraine. Denial, which is also known as justification. What is the difference between justification and denial? Is there any difference between them? Anything to distinguish justification from denial in any way?

Yes, the world denies other cultures. Denies women from being human beings. Denies homosexuals, transsexuals the right to existence! Denies one way of loving God for another.

It’s always undertaken in the name of being just, of being decent. If you bring up the notion of fairness on the other hand … They hem and haw, and start spinning really weak rationalizations. Can there be violence without denial?

Oh god, the rationalizations that people come up with are mind boggling. Yes. They stem from being rational, from being responsible, from notions of duty, loyalty, idealism. These lead to denial.

They spew such pseudo-intellectual bullshit to justify their abhorrent behaviour.

We have much more than out intellects to call on. Why don’t we? What keeps us from living that way?

Resistance? Fear? Territory? Protection of mates? No. It’s not rooted in instinct. It denies instinct. Fabricates faces for the abdication of a feeling sense of the world around us. My love and protectiveness of my mate require no justification, lead me to no such train of thought. If I did indulge in such a way, it would slow my response.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~