X-Ftn-To: keval dass 

"keval dass"  wrote:

>There is no truth higher than ahimsa

I waited, and waited, and hoped that someone will react to this, but
noting. Oh well.

This is a totally ridiculous statement. Allow me to explain.
Nonviolence (ahimsa) is obviously a good thing. If everybody acted
violently or committed violent acts, we would undoubtedly get to live
in hell, where everybody would try to kill the others. But, ahimsa is
obviously not the ultimate anything. You need to argue _why_
nonviolence is good. You will do that by calling upon a deeper
principle which makes ahimsa valid - such as love for the other
beings, or love for God who resides in them, or the realization of the
higher truth according to which all beings are embodiments of one
soul. So we already have two principles superior to ahimsa, love and
realization. It seems that even discrimination, or correct thinking,
is superior to ahimsa, because without it, one wouldn't be able to see
its real value.
So, ahimsa is good because it is a result of either or both love and
realization. Love and realization have their foundation in the Divine,
and ahimsa has its foundation in them, and is therefore only a
secondary or tertiary quality.
Now, ahimsa also can't have anything to do with any basic principle of
functioning of the reality. Why? Because in this world, its opposite
is prominent. Everything is filled with violence and violent acts. One
being eats other beings in order to live; in fact, for all beings
other than plants, violence is a life-supporting factor. 
Of course, then we get to the point that you need violence towards one
being in order to sustain life of another being, and so you need one
form of violence to sustain one form of nonviolence. Ahimsa is
obviously a relative principle, and has no absolute quality. You also
agree with me, because you are still alive, you didn't think that
nonviolence towards millions of viruses justifies letting yourself be
killed by a flu. So, even if we agree that nonviolence is good, and we
do, the fact remains that in order to practice nonviolence, you will
almost constantly need to use violence, or, choose between two forms
of violence and choose the lesser evil.

Nonviolence can justify killing people. For instance, if a lunatic
with an automatic rifle breaks into your home, and aims at your family
with intent to shoot immediately, the most nonviolent option available
would be if someone blew his brains out. An attempt to shoot at his
shoulder or something similar would probably only cause him to pull
the trigger.

Also, if you're in a peaceful country that's being invaded by the
Serbs, you know that your best shot at survival is to try to stop them
by all means possible. If you play nonviolence (as Bosnian president
Izetbegovic did) your people will be slaughtered on sight (see
Srebrenica). Those who aren't killed immediately will be brought to
concentration camps, where they'll be starved, tortured and/or raped,
and most will also be eventually killed. It is obvious that controlled
violence against the aggressors is the most nonviolent option
available. Therefore, a well armed defensive military force is the
best way to keep peace, if you have insane neighbours. All of that
stuff is practical experience since, to remind you, I'm from Croatia.

So, we proved first that nonviolence is by no means the highest truth,
because there are things in which it is founded, that are greater than
it, and also that the application of ahimsa in most practical cases
takes controlled violence and a choice of lesser evil. The corollary
of this is that this world does not support ahimsa as a primary
principle.

Now, this doesn't mean that God is a cruel insensitive bastard, or
that there is no God, as one could rightfully conclude from the
statement that ahimsa is the highest truth. It just means that there
are much more valuable things than nonviolence, one such being the
evolution of life and consciousness. Unlike ahimsa, the evolution is
obvious and very visible. The world that doesn't care about
nonviolence obviously feels that it's OK if you die, as long as you
learn from it. This is because God is the ultimate truth, and if
something leads to this ultimate truth, it is justified. It's OK to
use violence in order to teach someone a constructive lesson; the
entire law of karma follows this principle. It will teach you the
exact lesson that you need, and in a majority of cases it will be
painful to you, because karmic responses are the thing you get for
holding on to something lesser than God.

So, my conclusion is that God is the primary principle, His aspects
are, among others, consciousness and love, and ahimsa is merely an
attempt to apply these principles in life, which can sometimes be
useful, and sometimes controlled violence will be even more useful.
Since we can also see that reality supports this conclusion, and that
controlled violence, for instance slapping a hysterical person's face
in order to calm him down, can produce the best results. Also, since
people are firmly grounded in illusions of all sorts, a combination of
positive and negative aspects of teaching provides the best results;
positive aspects mean showing the ideal example and explaining the
highest reality, and negative aspects mean to criticize wrong actions,
thoughts and attachments to the irrelevant things.

These are the basic things and a display of yogic thinking.

-- 
Homepage: http://www.danijel.org