One of my current writing projects is forcing me to confront some tricky philosophical themes.

It is better to be a Warrior in a garden than to be a Gardener in a war

~ Ram Dass

I was stuck while writing my first Zen and Riot narrative. I painted this tense, unyielding picture of assassins and conspiracies and I began wondering how in the world I was going to resolve it all with any kind of reason, or satisfaction, by the end. The story lines of vengeance and utilitarian killing were dark. It all left a bad taste in my mouth. I felt I had to satisfy the storyline by providing noble killings by Elmwood Division in response to the gratuitous killings by The Freedom Initiative and honestly, it was taking me nowhere. It just seemed like an awful lot of killings overall, but I never felt anything would be resolved.

There’s a lesson, right there. So much war. Nothing resolved.

In one scene I had Sebastian Destinato Zen, the main protagonist, in a session with Zen’s Protocol. Zen’s mind merged with the algorithmic streams that enabled him to decrypt the world. Zen’s Protocol was his emotional prosthesis, a buffer that both extended and protected him. It allowed him to explore and make sense of a world that raged far beyond the limits of his own native emotional capacity.

“It is exhausting,” said Zen. “In moments of peace I know the storm will return. It hurts too much to yield the peace to the storm. I can’t stand it.”

Reexamine that assumption. If the storm always returns, perhaps our actions in battle are ineffective? Perhaps we are not winning the war? Are we truly warriors if we are hunters of vengeance? We have confronted this question many times before, you and I. Many times, without comfort or satisfaction.

“So many years,” said Zen. “So much killing. We played their game. Emptied our soul. I am exhausted by it. By this so-called sanity. Every death we are responsible for—however we justify it—comes at a cost to our peace.”

Zen reset, a process he called humming. Sometimes interacting with Zen’s Protocol was soothing. Easy. Other times, like today, it was unsettling and required significant effort. Humming in the stream was essential for perspective, to quiet the busy mind. As his mind calmed the data flowed around him with less friction. His relationship with Zen’s Protocol enabled him to experience the highly refined emotional spectra of human populations, even across time. It was a visceral, colorful exploration. Today, threads of blood streamed through the data. The slow orange burn of impatient greed. The soft cold blue of malice.

There is something else threading. Just a hint. But it is vital.

“Interesting.” Zen was awake, alert now.

Love is entering the equation.

And just like that I knew how to finish this narrative. I was able to construct scenes of final confrontations. Tense, emotional. But without gratuitous or necessary killing. There is a bit of killing in the final resolution, but it offers the opportunity to talk about the tricky balance of the warrior, to kill when necessary, or to allow innocents suffer and die.

A warrior of love and grace would stretch the boundaries of non-violence to their absolute limit. They would prefer to die than to kill, but would also recognize the responsibility to protect life and dignity. Violence, if it ever came to that, would be an act of desperate love, imbued with deep sadness, and immediately followed by efforts to restore peace and compassion. It is a very high bar, and a difficult ethical tightrope to walk.

Don’t worry. The bad guys pretty much get it in the neck at the end. That’s pretty much a given, right?