Integrating Ancient Wisdom in Modern Life: Nonviolence Means Love
- Yama means self restrained conduct. Yama is preparing to be self-aware of what not to do. They are nonviolence, truthfulness, non-stealing, continence and non-possessiveness. These Great Vows are universal, not limited by class, place, time or circumstance.
- Yama is the foundation stone for us to be in the world and how to relate with it. Yama is like the lotus flower that remains in the water but the water does not touch it – that gives it another significance that a man should live in the world untouched by it.
- Nonviolence means don’t hurt. It is the foundation and the target both. At all times, in all ways, to all beings, do not betray even in your mind.
- For Patanjali nonviolence simply means love life so much – so you realise, nonviolence is love…love life so much that you would not like to hurt anybody, that’s all. To be nonviolent means to be beneficial, to be helpful to everybody – to yourself and to others also. This is the first yama; the first self-discipline is love. Nonviolence means love. If you love then everything is okay. If you don’t love, even if you become nonviolent it is useless.
- For Patanjali love is the first discipline, the very base. If a seed remains in you to hurt others, when you will become powerful you will become dangerous. That seed will become the danger. Not a single seed should remain in you “to hurt”; and it is there in everybody.
- Non-violence is the announcement of life; love is life. Nonviolence is the first; love is always the first. And if you learn how to love, you learn everything. By and by the very phenomenon of love becomes encompassed around you: wherever you move, a grace moves with you, wherever you go, you go with gifts, you share your being. Nonviolence is not a negative thing; it is a positive feeling of love.
- Practising nonviolence will not allow you to escape from surroundings or feelings. Remember an incident from your own life when you were angry and instead of throwing the anger on others or suppressing it you focus on breath. You have neither thrown the anger on others nor on yourself. But you have calmed down and with that you and others both have grown in self.
- Violence simply means escaping from the self. And universal law says you cannot escape from yourself.
- Non-violence is the spread of happiness from a consciousness which is established in bliss. As light spreads from a lamp, similarly non-violence spreads from the consciousness which has attained bliss. That light is not for the sake of somebody; that is natural and auto-matic; that is the nature of bliss.
