Reality and Violence

“What we achieve inwardly
will change outer reality.”

— Otto Rank

What is real?

Early on in the process of preparing for the arrival of the “Violence Integrative Prevention and Restoration (PAR) Model,” I was struck by the realization that “now” has no duration. Any “now” of which I could conceive could be made infinitely smaller. And, any “now” that I thought about, as it steadily moves across the continuum of time, would have gone into the past by the time I became conscious of it. I learned earlier that, in terms of quantum mechanics, the world at the quantum level consists of probabilities, not certainties. Assuming this is true, the implications are interesting.

Perhaps the most interesting implication is that “reality” and our relationship to it is more flexible and has more possibilities than I realized. This led to a series of questions which immediately became obvious” Are we humans “things,” “processes,” or both? How much reality do we experience and how much do we miss? What is “experience” and how (and by whom) is it created? How does language figure in all of this?

Learning more about the work of Milton Erickson, MD; Steven Pinker, PhD; Ernest Becker, PhD; Ken Wilbur; Rūmī: a number of Zen practitioners: and a myriad of others helped me develop an appreciation for the influence language has in how I experience reality. I use words to think about the meaning, value, and nature of things. I use language to explain, calculate, justify, plan, and decide about things that have my attention. The moral framework in which I operate is a linguistic one.

Language and Reality

The appreciation of language is an important element in the PAR Model. It’s clear than none of us can experience the totality of reality. We’re very limited to the amount of information we can process, so we select information that best fits us and which is congruent with other information we have. In short, we construct our reality out of the raw materials the universe provides to us. And we use language to describe it to ourselves and to others.

The Universal Field, Discriminator, and the Construct

In the illustration above, the totality of reality is represented by the Universal Field. This field consists of all information at all times under all conditions. In our typical state of consciousness, we can’t be aware of and knowledgeable about every bit of information in the Universal Field. What we can do is select, interpret, and associate pieces of information which become our “reality” or Construct which we often — mistakenly — believe is the totality of reality.

The discriminating mechanism for pulling information out of the Universal Field is the Discriminator, which I sometimes refer to as the “lens.” The lens is tempered by our values, beliefs, aspirations, fears, and experience. The lens defines how we see the world, how we construct our “reality.” The Construct, of course, is not reality. It appears to us as reality because it’s what we know. And it’s very, very convincing.

Reality and Violence

In creating the PAR Model, I asked, “What is common in the construct of those who engage in violence? How did their reality get so marked by real or imagined powerlessness and an absence of alternatives that they resorted to violence?” I realized that the key to ending violence was ending the power deficiency which is very real to people in the grasp of violence. That means two things: First, helping them get clarity about the false power violence provides them and, second, exposing them to powerful alternatives which build their violence immune system.

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In future postings, I’ll delve into the notion of the construct as well as the issue of the human experience of power.