VAGDEVI SPIRITUAL PROCESS [#16172] WAGE A WAR AGAINST VERBAL VIOLENCE

Violence is of three types; the violence of thoughts, violence of deeds and verbal violence. Out of the three, in my opinion, the verbal violence is most dangerous. The animals, in general, are not violent. They act violently for their survival only. As against it, the human being, in general, is a violent entity. In fact, it is difficult to find a person who is not violent.

The violence is a natural consequence of an act of a living being that may harm, hurt, damage or destroy another living being. The violence may be committed unintentionally; for example, an insect on the ground may or may not get crushed if one is walking. We, while dealing with human violence, generally go by the dictionary meaning of violence, which highlights ‘physical violence’, leaving the other two, the violence of thought and the verbal violence.

All of us know it very well that our verbal communication may hurt others without our having to have intended it. No doubt, many of us, to express or deal with our displeasure, use such words that hurt/harm the one who, according to us, have caused it. Most of us do not retaliate or react to the misdeeds of others by causing some physical harm. The existing norms of our societies and our laws, in general, do not permit physical violence to resolve a clash of interests. We can claim that we are rather safe against physical violence of other human beings; although, we cannot claim to be sufficiently safe, notwithstanding our protective laws and the law and order mechanisms that are in place.

Interestingly, the modern human societies have no control over the violence of thoughts, unless a violent thought is converted into apparently violent action or expressed in some extreme form that may lead to physical violence. In this ‘business world’ there are law full ways of duping customers, competitors or governments. Similarly, freedom of expression may allow considerable violence to be perpetrated against human beings. Wherever or whenever ‘rights’ supersede ‘duties’ nonviolence becomes causality.

We rarely deal with others in the world as our equals. We either try to dominate or to follow others depending on the circumstances and occasions. We are more concern about ourselves than we are about others. We are very rarely taught and trained to establish ‘one-ness’ (अद्वैत, Advait) with other human beings. All these things are reflected in our speech howsoever hard we try to hide our feelings while communicating with others. When we dominate others, they get hurt; when others dominate us we get hurt. We all know that negative feelings stick with us to a greater extent than positive feelings. There is no need to elaborate what has been said above with lengthy narrations and examples. It is common knowledge that males dominate females; parents, teachers and elders dominate children; superiors dominate subordinate; the wealthy dominate poor; the performers dominate non-performers; those having higher status in the society dominate those having an inferior status; highly educated dominate those who are less educated; and so on and so forth.  It means, as human beings, we make others suffer from our verbal violence, and also, are subjected to suffer from verbal violence of others. We can say the ‘permanent sufferers’, viz. children, females, poor, subordinates and non-performers, etc. usually suffer  from verbal violence of others, thereby developing  personalities, which, by no means, can be called normal. This can also be expected that when getting an opportunity to make others suffer from their verbal violence to avenge the injustice caused to them earlier, such people with subdued personalities become instruments for perpetrating more verbal violence. Is it necessary to conclude that verbal violence causes more harm to an individual’s behavior and personality that violence of thoughts and deeds?

It is not difficult to eradicate verbal violence to a great extent if we all become very careful with our speech. But, is it possible if we cannot get rid of our mentality of making distinctions? The ideals can never be achieved, but making efforts to achieve them is a human quality of great value.

 PROMOD KUMAR SHARMA

[The writer of this blog is also the author of “Mahatma A Scientist of the Intuitively Obvious” and “In Search of Our Wonderful Words”.]