Violence is frightening. Violence is ugly. Violence is a cruel expression of power. And of all the forms of violence that we come in contact with, there is no denying the violence that the human mind is subjected to. Since our formative years in life, our childhoods have been about a persistent air of social conditioning which slowly acted as an agent of asphyxiation. This conditioning literally penetrates through your bloodstreams until finding a way into our cells. Growing up in a world which teaches you the ideas of racing against both time and people, the understanding of the joy of togetherness has scarcely been imparted for most of us. Comparison and Competition was the eternal theme during our school lives, and that is the tragedy of most of our generations.

Brexit bothers us. So does Trump as President. Football is all about a gory fight to emerge as the winner. The contradictions in what bothers us and how we still hold winning and our own selves as the priority while holding everything else as a distant second make our minds the hotbed for disturbing paradoxes which qualifies as more violence.

When you watch a child play football, you will witness the passion with which he kicks the ball just for the love of the game until we are successful in subjecting him to the wires of social conditioning which make him want to play only to win. We end up teaching him that losing is bad and that winning is the ultimate goal. As a result what we end up getting is the world we live in today – road rage, anger, depression, sadness, resentment, despair, self-pity, jealousy, angst, so on and so forth.

The collective conscience of the world currently spells Competition but that needs to go. It needs to go to pave way for Collaboration. Collaboration is the ultimate truth.

Collaboration fills us with gratitude and joy. Unknowingly, unwittingly, we are already in an unsung collaboration with everyone and everything around us. Remember how back in school we were taught how we have a symbiotic relationship with trees through the exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen? That is the power of collaboration and life depends wholly and solely on it.

There is nothing in the world that is manifested without collaboration – our very mortal existence is a result of the collaboration of a man and woman. As soon as this harmony between the two genders is made to get disrupted through competition, the resulting violence is spine-chilling. Looking deeper still, we’d find collaboration in the coming together of the elements of nature too- the earth, water, fire, and air all exist in sync with one another. It’s just that when it comes to our own lives, we’ve always lived in the lack of the awareness of this truth.

But, does collaboration work always? We may ask – why are there numerous instances of all forms of coming-together like mergers and acquisitions not yielding the desired results for so many people; worse still, why are they simply failing? Why are there so many failing marriages? The answer lies in the simple fact that when we collaborate at a superficial level without experiencing the truth of oneness, we end up limiting the magic of coming together. For in Oneness lies our Individuality and in this Uniqueness of the Celebration of the Self, lies our Oneness.

Ganesh Kohli