Watering Seeds of Joy and Peace

People were talking about violence in games recently. And the first thing that came to my mind was Thich Nhat Hanh's teaching about what we consume and why and how it influences us.

My feelings about violence in media have changed since I was a child. Back then the only arguments I heard suggesting we could benefit from being careful about how we consume media were from right-wing evangelicals who opposed human rights. I thought rejecting that idea was part of rejecting their bigotry.

But I've come to understand media as part of what we consume, and see how it can water different seeds in us, seeds we might not want to be watering. Fictional violence for entertainment stopped interesting me, and now I actively avoid it. There is more than enough real violence to attend to in the world.

In his book “Love in Action” about nonviolent social change Thich Nhat Hanh talks about the roots of war in our society. Not only the structural causes but the root causes of those structural causes.

He writes:

"There is a deep malaise in our society… The war is in our souls. Many of us are not healthy within, and yet we continue to look for things that only harm us more… We live in a society where we always feel we are lacking something, and we want to fill it… We are always trying to fill our void with something… But doing this only makes us less satisfied, hungrier, and we want to consume more. We feel alienated from ourselves. There is so much anger and fear in us, and we want to suppress them, so we consume more and more things that only increase the level of toxicity in us. We watch films filled with screaming and violence. We read magazines and novels filled with hatred and confusion. We do not even have the courage to turn off our TV, because we are afraid to go back to ourselves. Our society is sick. When we put a young person in this society without trying to protect them, they will receive violence, hatred, and fear every day and get sick. Our conversations, our TV programs, our advertisements, our newspapers, our magazines all water the seeds of suffering in young people and not-so-young people. How can we transform our individual consciousness and the collective consciousness of our society? The most important practice for preventing war is to stay in touch with what is refreshing, healing, and joyful inside us and all around us. If we practice walking mindfully, being in touch with the earth, the air, the trees, and ourselves, we can heal ourselves, and our entire society will also be healed. If the whole nation would practice watering seeds of joy and peace and not just seeds of anger and violence, the elements of war in all of us will be transformed. There are already seeds of peace in those we call 'hawks,' but they need us to water their seeds of peace and understanding or else their seeds of anger and aggression will continue to dominate them. Do not feel discouraged. Just by your way of looking at things and doing things, you influence others. Approach everyone with love and patience, and try to water the positive seeds in them. We have to help each other, being skillful, kind, and understanding. Blaming and arguing never help. In the practice of mindfulness, we nurture the ability to see deeply into the nature of things and people, and the fruit is insight, understanding, and love. Because we have not practiced deeply enough, violence has become the substance of our society… We accept violence as a way of life and as a way to deal with problems… We have to look at the roots of the problem and not just on the surface."

From “Love in Action: Writings on Nonviolent Social Change” by Thich Nhat Hanh.

— Tip me on ko-fi.