Violent thoughts are opposite to Compassionate/Lovingkind thoughts. The more you develop the Compassion/Lovingkindness meditation, and as a way of thinking throughout the day, you are going to become more non-violent. However, a lot of people judge themselves too much on just a thought arising that they are actually not going to act on. We want to see a difference here. We want to see the difference between a thought that we then create an action or speech around, and a thought that just arises, we just see it as a thought, and we let go of it.
Now all of you, as you have grown up, have probably watched violent TV, movies and whatever else, you have read about similar stuff, maybe you have seen it for real. It is already in there as a thought. It is already in there as a memory, as a perception. Occasionally these just pop up. Dreams are a classic place where you see things that are totally ridiculous, absolutely insane. You would never do it, but they just pop up. In your normal life, thoughts pop up, and a lot of this practice is to be able to just see the thought as a thought, and not react to it.
Now, if you are having a similar thought come again and again and again, a thought of violence that you are not able to just note and see just as an old thought, then we start working with antidote meditation techniques in which we use a counter-thought. The technique you learnt last night, the D/D method, is especially designed to help us dissolve lots of this stress we build around a particular problem we have got. So, if a person is having these violent thoughts, and thinks, "Oh, I've got to change the thoughts," even though their speech and their actions are already OK, really it is just the worry about the thought that is the problem. It is not actually the thought that is the problem, it is the worry about the thought. So by doing the D/D, realizing "Well, violent thoughts come up in my mind, violent thoughts also come up in another man's mind who is 53. "Wish him well, "Violent thoughts come up in a 53 year old woman's mind," wish her well. That was the first part of that D/D method, to basically see that violent thoughts come up in everybody's minds, whatever the age.
The second part of the D/D method, if you weren't clear, was that you come back to yourself, and consider somebody like yourself who has a violent thought, and then reacts to it. For a lot of people with violent thoughts, the first thing may be "I can't stand these thoughts," and they go and get drunk. But they still don't actually work them out. So we do Compassion/Lovingkindness for them. We take it further, there is a person with violent thoughts, they don't just get drunk, they are shooting up with heroin. Take it further, they beat their kids, take it further, they beat their wife and kids. Take it further, and we go to the extreme of the Dukkha that can be created: a person can have a violent thought, they act totally on it, they kill everybody they can see and they kill themselves.
So the D/D method is designed first to make us see that we are not alone, in having violent thoughts, etc. And lots of other people have a lot worse, so ours really isn't that important. That helps us to let go of the attachment that we have to the violent thoughts.