This Thing of Darkness

In these dark times it’s perhaps no surprise that our Sangha last night found themselves discussing the dark side of our human nature. This was started by the grim observation that when forced into a corner by something threatening our survival we would in all probability drop our bodhisattva ideals and become violent. Rats in a trap. The person who offered this insight was not happy about it but it just seemed that the evidence of our history pointed in this direction. I checked had I got it. Our basic human nature contains a violence that’s only not functioning just as long as things are good. Yes, she replied - and so did at least three other people in the group.

This reminded me of a series of talks I had given sometime during the late 1990’s called the Violence Seminars. I was interested to see how much of our human violence was caused by our current ‘civilised’ circumstances and how much was an innate mammalian characteristic. So, if we were not all jammed together struggling for resources and feeling endangered would we still be as war-like as we presently are? The obvious place to look for an answer for this was our primate first cousins, a group we share almost identical DNA with. What came out was not entirely surprising. Yes we all have the ability to fight for our survival but when we feel our survival is constantly under threat, the mechanism within us that controls this instinct can and does become ‘stuck’ on high and then we find ourselves much more quickly being an angrily reactive person willingly hurting others.

A Native American idea that we are all aware of captures this well. The wolf of love and the wolf of hate reside in us all. The teaching is the one we feed will become bigger and bigger so make a conscious choice about what we do. This fits in well with the Buddhist practices of a bodhisattva. They all feed the wolf of love, constantly challenging the habit of the wolf of hate to ‘other’ people who might be felt as a threat. So if we live within a defensive palisade then its walls are continually being pushed out, creating more in tribe and less and less out tribe until, ideally, we are all one tribe. Personally speaking I think this is realistic. It does not duck the issue of the darker side of our nature, rather it recognises it’s there and addresses the need to do something about it. It’s not fatalistically accepting we are violent apes and leaving it at that.

Now, I want to go one step deeper. This time informed by both more neuroscience and also Buddhist philosophy. Both disciplines have clearly recognised and demonstrated that how we perceive things - everything - is through the coloured lens of our previous experiences. We don’t see things as they really are, we see them with a distorting overlay of what has happened to us in our past. This is something easily forgotten. Fish do not see that they are swimming in water. So when we look at the world around us and formulate explanations for why it is as it is, we usually do not recognise that both our perception and responses reflect who we are and are not objective. So I, as someone who has experienced mindless violence right at the start of my life, will always be especially sensitive to violence and will unconsciously enlarge a danger into an existential threat when in fact it may not be. This of course is what we have all been exploring - becoming conscious of how our core wounds obscure how things really are. But what it means here is that when confronted with a world in which there are increasing places of conflict and the climate is changing, we need to remember that our emotional reactions obscure a realistic assessments of it. This is particularly evident in the extremes of those that are so fearful of climate change they ignore or deny it. And those that are so fearful of vulnerability that they continually feed their wolf of hate with the bodies of those their regimes have murdered.

So what to do? Well, first thing is to remember to question what we feel and think. If we know we distort things through the lens of our history then believing we are objective can only be nonsense. In fact there probably is no such thing as objectivity. The next thing is to work out what sort of coloured glass we are seeing through. Once we know this we can begin to consciously compensate for it. My red glass needs to be toned down for something more orange or even yellow. Or better still - entirely transparent. And finally we need to know the signs within us when we are particularly distorting things, what happens on a felt sense level when our cupboard full of pieces of coloured glass all fall out together in reaction to what might or might not be happening in the moment. Again we have frequently described this as feelings of contraction. All sensate organisms retract and move away when under threat.  Put as simply as I can - exchanging reaction for response. The problem is noticing it ….

NW. Thank you all. 26 March 2026