Session 673

Personal Reality, Session 673

Left alone, hate does not last.

Often it is akin to love, for the hater is attracted to the object of his hatred by deep bonds.  It can also be a method of communication, but it is never a steady constant state, and will automatically change if not tampered with.

If you believe that hate is wrong and evil, and then find yourself hating someone, you may try to inhibit the emotion or turn it against yourself – raging against yourself rather than another.  On the other hand you may try to pretend the feeling out of existence, in which case you dam up that massive energy and cannot use it for other purposes.

In its natural state, hatred has a powerful rousing characteristic that initiates change and action.  Regardless of what you have been told, hatred does not initiate strong violence.  As covered earlier in this book, the outbreak of violence is often the result of a built-in sense of powerlessness.  (See sessions 662-3 in Chapter Seventeen.)

Many who unexpectedly commit great crimes, sudden murders, even bringing about mass death, have a history of docility and conventional attitudes, and were considered models, in fact, of deportment.  All natural aggressive elements were denied in their natures, and any evidence of momentary hatred was considered evil and wrong.  As a result such individuals find it difficult, finally, to express the most normal denial, or to go against their given code of conventionality and respect.  They cannot communicate as, say, even animals can, with their fellow men as far as the expression of a disagreement is concerned.

Psychologically, only a massive explosion can free them.  They feel so powerless that this adds to their difficulties – so they try to liberate themselves by showing great power in terms of violence.  Some such individuals, model sons, for example, who seldom even spoke back to their parents, were suddenly sent to war and given carte blanche to release all such feelings in combat; and I am referring particularly to the last two wars (the war in Korea, 1950-53, and the war in Vietnam, 1964-73), not the Second World War.

In these wars aggressions could be released and codes still followed.  The individuals were faced, however, with the horror of their violently released, pent-up hatreds and aggressions.  Seeing these bloody results, they became even more frightened, more awed by what they thought of as this terrible energy that sometimes seemed to drive them to kill.

On their return home the code of behavior changed back to one suited to civilian life, and they clamped down upon themselves as hard as they could.  Many would appear as superconventional.  The “luxury” of expressing emotion even in exaggerated form was suddenly denied them, and the sense of powerlessness grew by contrast.

This is not to be a chapter devoted to war.  However, there are a few points that I do want to make.  It is a sense of powerlessness that also causes nations to initiate wars.  This has little to do with their “actual” world situation or with the power that others might assign to them, but to an overall sense of powerlessness – even, sometimes regardless of world dominance.

In a way I am sorry that this is not the place to discuss the Second World War (1939-45), for it was also the result of a sense of powerlessness which then erupted into a mass blood bath on a grand scale.  The same course was followed privately in the cases of such individuals as just mentioned.

Without going into any detail, I simply want to point out that in the United States strong national efforts were made after World War II to divert the servicemen’s energies into other areas on their return home.  Many who entered that war feeling powerless were given advantages after it was over – incentives, education, benefits they did not have before it.  They were given the means to power in their own eyes.  They were also accepted home as heroes, and while many certainly were disillusioned, in the whole framework of the country’s mood the veterans were welcomed.

I am speaking generally now about the war under discussion, for there were certainly exceptions, yet most of the men involved in it learned something from their experiences.  They turned against the idea of violence, and each in his own way recognized the personal psychological ambiguities of their feelings during combat.

They were told by politicians that it was to be the last war, and the irony is that most of those in uniform believed it.  The lie did not become truth but it became more nearly so, for despite their failures the ex-servicement managed to bring up children who would not go to war willingly, who would question its premise.

In an odd way this made it even more difficult for those who did go into the next two, less extensive wars, for the country was not behind either one.  Any sense of powerlessness on the part of the individual fighting men was given expression as before, this time in a more local blood bath, but the code itself had become shaky.  This release was not as accepted as it had been before, even within the ranks.  By the last war (in Vietnam), the country was as much against it as for it, and the men’s feelings of powerlessness were reinforced after it was over.  This is the reason for the incidents of violence on the part of returning servicemen.

Hate, left alone then, does not erupt into violence.  Hatred brings a sense of power and initiates communication and action.  In your terms it is the build up of natural anger; in animals, say, it would lead to a face-to-face encounter, of battle stances in which each creature’s body language, motion, and ritual would serve to communicate a dangerous position.  One animal or the other would simply back down.  Growling or roaring might be involved.

Power would be effectively shown, but symbolically.  This type of animal encounter occurs infrequently, for the animals involved would have had to ignore or short-circuit many lesser preliminary anger or initiation encounters, each meant to make positions clear and to ward off violence.

Another small point here:  Christ’s dictum to turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39, for instance) was a psychologically crafty method of warding off violence – not of accepting it.  Symbolically it represented an animal showing its belly to an adversary.  The remark was meant symbolically.  On certain levels, it was the gesture of defeat that brought triumph and survival.  It was not meant to be the cringing act of a martyr who said, “Hit me again”, but represented a biologically pertinent statement, a communication of body language.  It would cleverly remind the attacker of the “old” communicative postures of the sane animals.

Love is also a great inciter to action, and utilizes dynamos of energy.

Love and hate are both based upon self-identification in your experience.  You do not bother to love or hate persons you cannot identify with at all.  They leave you relatively untouched.  They do not elicite deep emotion.

Hatred always involves a painful sense of separation from love, which may be idealized.  A person you feel strongly against at any given time upsets you because he or she does not live up to your expectations.  The higher your expectations the greater any divergence from them seems.  If you hate a parent it is precisely because you expect such love.  A person from whom you expect nothing will never earn your bitterness.

In a strange manner, then, hatred is a means of returning to love; and left alone and expressed it is meant to communicate a separation that exists in relation to what is expected.

Love, therefore, can contain hate very nicely. Hatred can contain love and be driven by it, particularly by an idealized love.  You “hate” something that separates you from a loved object.  It is precisely because the object is loved that it is so disliked if expectations are not met.  You may love a parent, and if the parent does not seem to return the love and denies your expectations, then you may “hate” the same parent because of the love that leads you to expect more.  The hatred is meant to get you your love back.  It is supposed to lead to a communication from you, stating your feelings – clearing the air, so to speak, and bringing you closer to the love object.  Hatred is not the denial of love, then, but an attempt to regain it, and a painful recognition of circumstances that separate you from it.

If you understood the nature of love you would be able to accept feelings of hatred.  Affirmations can include the expression of such strong emotions.

Dogmas or systems of thought that tell you to rise above your emotions can be misleading – even, in your terms, somewhat dangerous.  Such theories are based upon the concept that there is something innately disruptive, base, or wrong in man’s emotional nature, while the soul is always depicted as being calm, “perfect”, passive and unfeeling.  Only the most lofty, blissful awareness is allowed.  Yet the soul is above all a fountain of energy, creativity, and action that shows its charactristics in life precisely through the ever-changing emotions.

Trusted, your feelings will lead you to psychological and spiritual states of mystic understanding, calm, and peacefulness.  Followed, your emotions will lead you to deep understandings, but you cannot have a physical self without emotions any more than you can have a day without weather.

In personal contact, you can be quite aware of an enduring love for another person, and still recognize moments of hatred when separations of a kind exist that you resent because of the love you know is involved.

In the same way, it is possible to love your fellow human beings on a grand scale, while at times hating them precisely because they so often seem to fall short of that love.  When you rage against humanity it is because you love it.  To deny the existence of hate then is to deny love.  It is not that these emotions are opposites.  It is that they are different aspects, and experienced differently.  To some extent you want to identify with those you feel deeply about.  You do not love someone simply because you associate portions of yourself with another.  You often do love another individual because such a person evokes within you glimpses of your own “idealized” self.

The loved one draws your best from you.  In his or her eyes you see what you can be.  In the other’s love you sense your potential.  This does not mean that in a beloved person you react only to your own idealized self, for you are also able to see in the other, the beloved’s potential idealized self.  This is a peculiar kind of vision shared by those involved – whether it be wife and husband, or parent and child.  This vision is quite able to perceive the difference between the practical and the ideal, so that in ascendant periods of love the discrepancies in, say, actual behavior are overlooked and considered relatively unimportant.

Love is of course always changing.  There is no one [permanent] state of deep mutual attraction in which two people are forever involved.  As an emotion love is mobile, and can change quite easily to anger or hatred, and back again.

Yet, in the fabric of experience, love can be predominant even while it is not static; and if so then there is always a vision toward the ideal, and some annoyance because of the differences that naturally occur between the actualized and the vision.  There are adults who quail when one of their children says, “I hate you”.  Often children quickly learn not to be so honest.  What the child is really saying is, “I love you so.  Why are you so mean to me?”  Or, “What stands between us and the love for you that I feel?”

The child’s antagonism is based upon a firm understanding of its love.  Parents, taught to believe that hatred is wrong, do not know how to handle such a situation.  Punishment simply adds to the child’s problem.  If a parent show fear, then the child is effectively taught to be afraid of this anger and hatred before which the powerful parent shrinks.  The young one is conditioned then to forget such instinctive understanding, and to ignore the connections between hatred and love.

Often you are taught not only to repress verbal expression of hate, but also told that hateful thoughts are as bad as hateful actions.

You become conditioned so that you feel guilty when you even contemplate hating another.  You try to hide such thoughts from yourself.  You may succeed so well that you literally do not know what you are feeling on a conscious level.  The emotions are there, but they are invisible to you because you are afraid to look.  To that extent you are divorced from your own reality and disconnected from your own feelings of love.  These denied emotional states may be projected outward upon others – an enemy in a war, a neighbor.  Even if you find yourself hating the symbolic enemy, you will also be aware of a deep attraction.

A bond of hate will unite you, but the bond was originally based upon love.  In this case however you aggravate and exaggerate all those differences from the ideal, and focus upon them predominantly.  In any given case all of this is consciously available to you.  It requires only an honest and determined attempt to become aware of your own feelings and beliefs.  Even your hateful fantasies, left alone, will return you to a reconciliation and release love.

A fantasy of beating a parent or a child, even to death, will if followed through lead to tears of love and understanding.