I Just Want the Cruelty To Stop

One of the disadvantages of writing blogs for our small Sangha each week is that I have had to leave behind for the moment pieces on what is happening in our wider world. I’m one of those people who have decided that continually listening to the news is personally destructive - and perhaps because of this I have become a little insulated from the impact of the daily spiral of horror. Well, that’s what I thought ….

Over the last couple of days I have been a little unwell, nothing serious, but enough to leave me feeling a bit stripped and vulnerable. So much so that the seemingly innocuous ‘whodunit’ I was reading became unbearably painful when I realised that the wife of the endearing detective, a lovely character with a small child, was herself to become one of the murder victims. (I had skimmed forward when I guessed it and then finding my guess correct, dreaded each page because I knew what was coming.) I’m not really sure what was going on here but I suspect I was identifying with the detective’s overwhelming grief by imagining myself into his shoes - which one day I might quite possibly be in.

Then the emotion fully struck. Talking to Philippa about just how painful the book had become and my speculation that the author had known this type of loss herself, I went on to talk about the next book in the series and the appearance of another lovely female character and named her. Philippa then said, ‘Oh, he marries her and they are together with their child in the latest book - whoops, I’ve spoilt it!’ And I could have wept - as I could now as I recall it.

So what’s going on? Well, I’m ridiculously romantic and illness certainly lowers defences but I think this reaction to a bunch of fictional characters - my deeply wanting for something good to come out of all their heartbreak - really reflects what I want now. I just want all the cruelty and stupidity in the world to stop. And when I find myself properly in touch with myself I discover I’m absolutely desperate for goodness. It’s a huge gaping hole.

Now, this could easily be an intro. to bodhicitta and compassion but somehow this doesn’t feel right. For a start it’s entirely selfish, It’s my desperation even though it inevitably touches everyone else as well. And besides, the felt sense is different - more personal, more painful. It doesn’t come from a place of generosity but somewhere much more primitive - and that makes me think about an idea I have never been quite certain of - Tsoknyi Rinpoche’s notion of ‘essence love’. An ‘ inherent, unconditional sense of "okay-ness," warmth, and well-being that exists within every person regardless of external circumstance’. So something in built within our humanity, a propensity to give and receive love, to feel love as our natural state. Not yet the wisdom love of a bodhisattva but the seed from which this grows. And then this links to yet another idea from the psychologist C. G. Jung, the notion of ‘frustration of archetypal intent ’ which is something we feel when something intrinsic to our nature is prevented from finding expression - such as the innate expectation of being within a loving environment. Jung believed that this was as much a cause of serious mental illness as was any form of trauma. It puts us at odds with everything within us. A yearning that cannot be made better until it is answered.

And I think this is my self-diagnosis. Tsoknyi Rinpoche may be right that at our core there is love, a quite natural love, but the evidence suggests this love is fragile and may easily be harmed and that we can become estranged from it and when we are we deeply long for its lost presence. Could it be then that the whole world now knows this yearning and weeps for its absence as a handful of evil psychopaths rip up the world solely for their own benefit? Well, that’s how it feels at the moment.

NW. 10 March 2026. And I am not going to tell you what I was reading.