Are we naturally violent? I think not. I think there is a distinction between innate behavior and natural behavior. Innate behavior, actions and responses that are hardwired into an individual from birth. Natural behavior, actions and responses that occur in a natural, unforced manner often influenced by the environment.
So in my life, I have not experienced the kind of violence and anger that we see on the daily news. The other morning, I listened to the BBC and of the 18 stories, all were sad, tragic, negative. They filled me with darkness and I stepped down and down and down and down and then I went, wait a moment. Wait a moment. This is not my life.
It’s not my life. In fact, it’s not the life for most of us. Right? We live pretty decent lives. We’re pretty happy people for the most part and yes, bad things do happen, but usually not.
Usually not. We finish school. We get a job. We fall in love. We eventually have a family.
We save a little money. We have some purpose to our life and so on it goes. But I would like to share 2 stories that I think reinforce this idea that we are not violent people. The first one is when I was quite young. It was before I was married and my fiance and I, Louise, after work, we went to a local pub in my little industrial village and sat to have a drink, and we were with the chef from the restaurant we were working at, Joe Garrett.
And Joe Garrett, as the evening went along, would slowly get more and more drunk as he cooked, so to speak. You know, and at the time, I’m about, what, 24 years old, 23 years old. I really didn’t have a good idea that the man should not drink when he was working because it seemed to be part of the culture, so to speak. So as Joe got a little bit worse in his culinary skills, the food obviously got less and less appealing. Now this was a very expensive restaurant in this little industrial town.
So this particular evening, Joe had cooked a bad meal for a group of fishermen. One of whom was named the mountain. So there we are sitting in this bar with Joe Garrett, and lo and behold, the mountain arrives. And Joe and this mountain get into an altercation, and it gets a little bit unpleasant. And then Louise, my fiance, says to him, mountain.
That’s unnecessary, and then he’s rude to Louise. So you’re young and you’re hot tempered, so I jumped up to confront this mountain. And Luis said to me, what are you doing? And, you know, it’s not a matter of being brave. Like, what does Osho say?
There are no cowards. There are no heroes. It’s only action. So I go and act. I go up to him.
And he’s sitting at the bar with his cronies and I tap him on the back. And I always remember, he spun around. This is a big man and I’m was looking at his navel. And he says, yeah. And I said, Mountain, you’ve been rude to Louise.
And he, of course, asks in a rather guttural tone, what are you gonna do about it? And I thought to myself, oh, well, I’m going to have a broken nose and I’m going to lose all my teeth and it’s going to be a mess, but that’s not what comes out of my mouth. It was almost like it was god ordained. What comes out of my mouth is mountain. You’re 3 times the size of me.
I’m asking you as a gentleman to please not say those things. And then I waited for and the hospital whiteness waking up. Nothing happens. And then through the fog of my fear, basically, he reaches down and taps me on the shoulder and says, Leon, you’re right. I’m sorry.
And then proceeds to come over to the table and apologizes to Luis. Remarkable. But it showed me the value, if you will, of action. So So we don’t have to worry about being afraid because, gosh, I was afraid, but it is action that really matters. My second story, also in my little industrial village, happened a number of years later.
I was walking along and I think we had a bit of a snowstorm. So there was slight snow on the ground or ice at least. It was a cold evening. And I’m walking along and the pub, this pub I was referring to before, was in a bit of a valley on the way to the sea in this little village, and I was walking along the ridge and I hear this horrible screaming coming out of the pub. And the door is flung open and this gargantuan man comes out about the size of mister mountain once again, but it wasn’t him, but a big man surrounded by a coterie of women, and they’re all screaming abuse and etcetera, etcetera.
Think what’s going on here? I looked a little closer. Then out of the door of the pub comes a smaller man, muscular, but a lot smaller. And I realized there’s gonna be an altercation. There’s gonna be a fight, and, you know, people are screaming, kill him.
Kill him. Kill him. You know, things along this nature. Gee, I should run to the police, but I was transfixed by what was going on. So the big guy proceeds to take off his coat.
The little guy doesn’t have a coat. And as the big guy’s arms are pinned behind him, the little man strikes and hits the big guy in the face 15 or 20 times. You could hear the blows. It was actually quite thickening. And he, unconscious, falls backwards on the ground, And everyone stopped screaming.
And the little guy walked back in the pub, and the women kind of looked at him or the crowd looked at him rather disgustingly and then walked in the pub too. So once again, we had action. But I don’t endorse physical violence at all because we all know it accomplishes nothing. But that essentially was my experience. I tend to believe that we are naturally kind, loving in my experience in life and I have traveled quite a bit.
I met some lovely people. I’ve experienced some bad things but not many. Not many at all. I’ve experienced kindness and decency and help all coming from the human corpus. So you know what they say.
You know what they say. Critical thinking is wonderful. It’s beautiful. It helps us in life, and critical thinking is great. You take care of yourself. Bye bye.