If We Truly Felt Others’ Pain, Would Violence Exist?
There’s a scene in the 90s movie Powder that left a mark on my heart and stirred something deep in my soul.
A deputy takes a group of teenagers out on a hunting trip. At some point, he proudly shoots a deer. One of the boys, Powder — unusually sensitive, deeply attuned to life — walks over to the dying animal. He takes the deputy’s hand and places his own on the deer’s body. And in that instant, Powder becomes a bridge, a conductor.
Something passes between them, invisible, wordless but undeniable. The deputy is shaken to the core. He feels it all. The terror. The pain. The void. The life leaving the body. Not metaphorically or with guilt. He physically feels the deer’s suffering in his own body.
Later, when a teacher asks Powder what he did, his response is simple, almost haunting:
““I let him see. I opened him up and I let him see.
He just couldn’t see what he was doing, so I helped him.””
And it worked. The deer’s suffering no longer lived in the abstract. It became an embodied experience.
The deputy, still reeling, tries to explain to his superior:
““I simply can’t do this anymore.
I can’t look at something down the barrel of a gun without thinking about it.””
One moment of forced empathy, fully felt, and everything changed.
That scene left a mark on me.
What if that deep empathic gift became ours?
Not just to understand suffering intellectually, but to feel it. To sense the harm we cause, not in theory, but in our bone marrow, in our cells, in our nervous systems.
Would war still be possible?
Could violence survive?
Would cruelty have any ground to stand on?
I doubt it.
This truth hit me hard when my own spiritual awakening began. The illusion of separation began to slowly unravel. And I saw more clearly: what we do to another, we do to ourselves. Not metaphorically but energetically, emotionally, somatically.
Ripples always return
As Jamie Sams writes in Dancing the Dream:
““We all make ripples. And those ripples do come back to us.””
Every thought. Every word. Every action.
Carving itself into the collective field we all share.
The ripple always returns.
I realize, we may not all be like Powder. We may not be able to lay hands on a someone and awaken them in an instant. But we can choose to live differently. We can stretch empathy beyond the borders of convenience, past species, culture, and political ideology. We can become conductors of love and care, not just for those closest to us, but for the entire web we are part of.
We need a bigger story
The stories we’ve been living, of dominance, division, control are worn thin. They have cost us so much. Too much! We need, as Joseph Campbell once wrote,
“Myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.”
Because once you identify with the planet, once you know in your bones that Earth is you, and you are Earth, empathy becomes inevitable.
We start seeing with the eyes of the deer. We start hearing with the ears of the oppressed. We begin to care, not out of obligation, but because something inside us remembers how to feel again.
The way forward is empathy
Not just for those who look like us, who speak our language, pray to our god, or belong to our group. But for all living beings.
We can feel deeper, listen more. Most importantly we can take responsibility for the ripples we create. Because we’re not separate. We never were.
And maybe, if more of us strive to live from that place, violence, cruelty, and indifference wouldn’t be so easy to carry. Maybe compassion would stop being an option, and start becoming the only way forward.
I know it’s a big ask. But let’s try.
Because the world doesn’t need more walls. It needs hearts brave enough to feel everything.
