The 'So Purkh'

Last night a student asked what I was playing during shavasana, knowing instinctively that it was a prayer. I told her that it was the 'So Purkh', a long Sikh prayer chanted by women to take the war and violence out of men and make them saints. I had heard it first, not at Solstice, but in Saul David Raye's workshop. I'd come in one day before the seminar, and he was playing it. I knew it was in Gurmukhi, because I had been learning to recite the Ray Man Shabd. My heart felt at peace, and when I found out from Saul that it was chanted by women for men, I thought, "But what about the violence in me?"

Saul said men had come up to him with tears in their eyes, asking what the music was because they felt their hearts opening. And granted, most violence is perpetrated by young adult males, but not always; all the violence in the world isn't committed by Clockwork Orange-style droogies indulging in ultra-violence or even just men in general, or human males in general. Some women are violent and some can be pathologically aggressive as well, and animals can be as well.

Yes, animals. While I've been reading Temple Grandin's "Animals in Translation", I read her descriptions of the different forms of aggression and then of animal violence. Some people like to believe that only humans commit rapes, murders, or wage wars. But male chimpanzees will have border wars and kill each other off, as Jane Goodall discovered. "Many animals can be horrifically violent for no reason, it seems, other than the sheer desire to kill and maybe even to torture. The man who tortured me for sport, like I was Tess of the D'Urbervilles, would have the world believing that this only proves his theory that Golding's "Lord of the Flies" is an accurate appraisal of the state of the world, but I digress. Violence is not the only thing in the world, but it does exist, and sadly enough, our beloved dolphins are capable of it too. Rachel Smolker, in her book "To Touch a Wild Dolphin," describes male dolphins who "commit gang rape, brutal killings of dolphin 'children', and the mass murder of porpoises." Violence is not the only thing, but it is everywhere, and in everyone... (still writing...not done yet)