Love in Action by Thich Nhat Hanh

Author:Thich Nhat Hanh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Parallax Press
Published: 1993-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

— Chapter Six —

The Roots of War

There is a deep malaise in our society. Look at the way young people consume drugs, as a way to forget. These are the seeds of war that we have to acknowledge if we want to transform them. We have to do it together, looking deeply into the nature of the war in our collective consciousness. 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 come home from work exhausted, and we do not know how to relax. We feel a kind of vacuum in ourselves, so we turn on the television. We live in a society where we always feel we are lacking something, and we want to fill it. If we don’t turn on the TV, we eat or read or talk on the telephone. We are always trying to fill our void with something. Some people do social or political work this way. 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.

The night I heard President Bush give the order to attack Iraq, I could not sleep. I was angry and overwhelmed. The next morning in the middle of my lecture, I suddenly paused and told my friends, “I don’t think I will go to North America this Spring.” The words just sprang out. Then I continued the lecture. In the afternoon, one American student told me, “Thây, I think you have to go to the United States. Many friends there feel the same as you do, and it would help if you would go and support them.” I did not say anything. I practiced breathing, walking, and sitting, and a few days later, I decided to go. I saw that I was one with the American people, George Bush, and Saddam Hussein. I had been angry with President Bush, but after breathing consciously and looking deeply, I saw myself as President Bush. I had not been practicing well enough to change this situation. I saw that Saddam Hussein was not the only person who had lit the oil wells in Kuwait. All of us reached out our hands and lit them with him.

In our collective consciousness, there are some seeds of nonviolence, and President Bush did begin with sanctions. But we did not support and encourage him enough, so he switched to a more violent way. We cannot blame only him. The President acted the way he did because we acted the way we did.

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