I'll give you my perspective on a few of these issues brought up here.
First, I'd like to remind us violence is not bad. Brush fires are violent.
Now, in people, violence is often rooted in fear/hatred and ultimately self-serviceness which is the intention behind most desire.
(Desire and wanting is tricky in language though because the words can be used to describe something selfless. You understand this. You can distinguish "want (for my personal pleasure)" from "see the necessity of". But it's fine for someone to say "I want food"... common language is a problem in these subtle issues.)
I don't see the ego as wanting to live in others minds as an image for sustenance thing.
(I don't see it as wrong. It never really came to mind.)
I see more of an ego seeking self-glorification issue and maybe it sees others as part of itself since it wants to own everything for itself and when others don't support its prime directive of self glorification it moves to destroy them.
(I'm reaching here. Some of these ideas came from others' observations of psychopaths that I've read.)
Yes, i see this whole becoming thing as the ego/self desperately trying to validate itself because it's truly nothing.
Deep down people want to be witnessed. That's what we do to ourselves with Tai Chi. We stop our running and see our self. We aren't the mind with the thoughts. We aren't the body. We aren't the feelings. We are the spark inside that sees. We witness god. God witnesses god. Creation needs an audience.
Just seeing our tensions relaxes them. I don't understand the mechanics of that yet.
Being seen is a deep directive.
Then I see these Columbine kids as wanting to be seen so badly that they explode for it.
At any time they could have seen themselves, but we all know how hard it is to stop running around and do Tai Chi.
Their violence is their natural and good witness-god-directive twisted because they are so afraid of or hate so much what they are.
It's like the piece of god we are assigned the responsibility for witnessing is our self and others in our life.
