Violence does not need action, nor a weapon. It doesn’t need a slap, a bullet or an angry word. All violence needs is the perspective that someone or something should be different than it is. This does not mean that I should not work to change things for the better, to correct injustice or protect the vulnerable. But it does mean that I must be extremely careful in how I approach these corrections, or I run the risk of imposing my own will and performing my own violence upon another. 

When I am angry with you or criticize you or think that you are in the wrong, what I am saying is that you should be different than you are. This approach assumes a couple things. First, it assumes that I possess an omniscience, a certainty, a direct knowledge of something which I have no possible way of knowing — it assumes I know your motives, your history, your thoughts, and all the infinite causes leading up to this moment. Second, it assumes that I also possess a certainty about the best method that will fix you, which will bring you around to the “correct” position. Both of these assumptions are a subtle form of violence, that can span a spectrum from benign disapproval all the way up to homicide. This violence says that unless you become different than you are, I cannot be happy. It says that unless and until you change in this way and in that, you are in control of my happiness, and this is the fantasy. This is The Fall from Grace, this is Maya, this is The Play, the Dream. This is the belief in an imaginary, separate Self that lives in a world over which it seems to have power—or not. A Self that believes that it must wield power over another or upon a situation over which it has no control, in order to obtain or reject an outcome it must have in order to find peace.

The only appropriate response to my violence towards another is compassion for myself. Lost in the Dream, I mistook the unreal for the real, I believed in chaos where there is always only harmony, I misread heaven for hell. If I am at the receiving end of the one who is angry, again the only appropriate response to that violence is compassion, for in compassion is total acceptance, total openness, total love of What Is, for I cannot say that I love the light and not the dark, without which there could be no light. Compassion understands the pain of being adrift in the Dream, of thinking, for even a second, that we don’t live in a constant miracle wrapped in an exquisite wonder, enfolded in an unending flowering of beauty.