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metanymous в посте Metapractice (оригинал в ЖЖ)

When people kill other people, it is usually in anger or rage, and that involves disconnection and rejection. If you stay connected with the other person’s humanity, then if you decide in a certain situation that you need to kill someone to protect yourself or someone else, it would be with a sense of enormous sadness that this was necessary. That would make it much less likely that someone would kill. It is too easy to kill out of anger, disconnection and rejection, and I would like to make it as difficult as possible. If you need to kill, it should be with great sorrow, and never in anger. Anger separates, while sorrow maintains a connection.
“Anger” is only one letter short of “danger.” While the harm that anger and violence often does to others is pretty obvious, the harm that anger does to the person who is angry is not so widely recognized — and I don’t mean just the high blood pressure and other physiological effects, but the mental ones.
In many Native American traditions, you find that it is imperative that when you take the life of an animal, you do it with great respect, and sadness, and explain to its spirit that you did this in order to feed or protect yourself and your family. They apparently knew somehow that if they took life in anger or in sport that the “spirit of the animal” would come back to haunt them and harm them, because of the lack of connection and respect.
Even in the Star Wars series, which is of our most popular current mythic icons, there is this underlying presupposition, although it is easy to lose track of it amongst all the slaughter and destruction. The message is that anger and hate will turn the life force against itself, and become the dark side of the force. In the second movie, The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda, a sort of Zen master, is teaching Luke the Jedi ways:
Yoda: A Jedi’s strength flows from the force. But beware of the dark side — anger, fear, aggression — the dark side of the force are they, easily they flow, ready to join you in a fight. Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did Obi Wan’s apprentice. (Darth Vader) A Jedi uses the force for knowledge and defense, never for attack.
Luke: There’s something not right here. I feel cold. Death.
Yoda: That place is strong with the dark side of the force. A domain of evil it is. And you must go.
Luke: What’s in there?
Yoda: Only what you take with you. (Luke starts to put on his weapons belt.) Your weapons; you will not need them.
Luke continues to put on his weapons and lowers himself into a sort of cave in the jungle swamp. He encounters Darth Vader, draws his light saber, fights him, and cuts his head off. Then when he cuts open Vader’s helmet, he finds his own dead face inside. In his anger, he has killed himself.
In the third film, Return of the Jedi, The emperor and Darth Vader capture Luke, and the Emperor taunts him with his defeat, and says to him, “Gooood. I can feel your anger. I am defenseless. Take your weapon. Strike me down with all of your hatred, and your journey toward the dark side will be complete.”
But Luke eventually refuses to give in to hatred, and when the Emperor attempts to kill him, it is not hate, but his father’s (Darth Vader’s) love for him that saves him.
So there is an additional message here — that no matter how far into the dark side someone goes, there is still a kernel of love that can be redeeming.
Of course that’s just a movie; how about something more practical. In the Asian martial arts, such as T’ai Chi, Aikido and Karate, the fundamental principle is to stay connected with the destructive force that is attacking you, and then rather than opposing it directly, use this connection to change the direction of the force. In hand-to-hand combat, this approach is very practical, using minimal force for maximum result.