I was looking around trying to define what “hate” means to a person. I liked this particular definition: intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury. In defining one thing I find it useful to examine (compare and contrast) the antonym. At the moment I “hate” some of my family members for what they have done.
Edit: Someone once said to me that we can only ever hate one “person” or “collective persons” at a time.
So how are you connecting this to religion/spirituality?
In several ways. For me, as I noticed “hate” developing towards some of my family members I notice that anger/hate towards other things subsided. These previous things, that were a source of rage, appear to be a non-issue at this point in time (they are there but had zero impact upon me). As I said, it is sometimes useful to examine the antonym of something in order to understand it better (the antonym of hate being love). I think these are central concepts to all religions/spiritualities
This then got me thinking that at the core of the human psych is the: agonist, protagonist, and antagonist.
I cannot recall a moment in my life where at some point there was not an antagonist present. Generally not making me the protagonist by default, I generally see my self as the agonist.
The family members that I hate are no longer a physical part of my life and so who is the antagonist? It is my own psyche that I “hate” and ultimately I want to purge the pain and memories within my own psyche.
This then got me thinking about how Psalm 139 expresses this perfectly.
From Wikipedia: The Hebrew word describing David’s “perfect hatred” means that it “brings a process to completion”. In other words, goal oriented opposition. The ultimate opposition to those who oppose [size=50]God [/size]would be to get them to love [size=50]God[/size].
Meaning, I find the pain of my own hatred tormenting; be it directed towards my family or any other entity (individual, collective or conceptual). I want to purge this demon from my inner being and allow those who have rightful ownership to return.
Hope that answers your question.
Cheers
Yup.
I find this also, though the people I hate are not family - not that everything is resolved with them, but since my parents are dead and I have no siblings, and I was pretty expressive with and about my parents, there just isn’t the kind of unpleasant mulling over in the mind that I am taking you to be talking about.
For those people I feel hatred for, it is very mixed with other feelings as well. I think we tend to want to focus on certain emotions and not others. Under the hate I have found shame, guilt, fear, and this has helped soften the hatred and also the other feelings. I mean, there was one person I would find myself feeling anger about - I haven’t seen them in over ten years, I cut them off, and then I realized that while I did, yes, play over in my mind things they did that hurt me, in the end what I actually felt was guilt. I was not there for this person. I was with someone romantically who I loved and who loved me. I was lucky. This other person probably still feels hurt. And so on. It surprised me that guilt was actually the driving force under the anger. REally, I was angry because I felt guilty, and for all I know she is happy as a clam and never thinks about me. And then if she is hurt, out there, this is not my responsibility. I am not her savior.
Religions and spirituality tend to judge hate. I think hate at root is a forceful pushing away on something that seems to be causing us pain or damage. Hate is not bad, though sitting around stewing for decades is bad. But bad in a health way, not a moral way, as far as I am concerned.
I tend to allow feelings to express including hate and see where it goes. Often this is enough to let off the steam. If not, then probably there is a facet of the relationship I am still not facing or there are other emotions present that I do not want to look at.
Ruts and habits are a problem, the emotions themselves are not.
Yeah, I was cool with my parents despite all the mistakes they made (I guess I could empathize with the difficult life they had). So I am talking about a few of my siblings (not all) and it is the unpleasant mulling type hatred I am talking about (you are correct). I guess I do not tend to see hate as an emotion as such. I tend to view it as a persistent remembrance of anger associated with a sense of hurt (emotional and/or physical but eventually purely emotional). So yes, I see ruts and habits of mind as the problem too and not the emotion themselves. At the moment I have the habit of anger (hatred) well ingrained in my mind after persistent and ongoing attacks from some of my siblings. The fact that it is family is irrelevant (it could be anyone). And yes, sitting around brooding in a hateful manner is bad in the sense that it is the cause of our own emotional distress.
While I lie in bed brooding and cannot sleep, it is not my siblings that are harming me. The only enemy is the enemy within and this is the enemy of habitual patterns of thought/feelings (my disposition if you want to call it that). If it was not my siblings that triggered me off I am sure some other “temptation” would have just came along and made me feel the same way.
Get above it. Demons don’t work well while being watched from above by their host.
And by “get above it”, I mean “acquire a more encompassing life such that such conflicts are merely a small part of it”. And if from such a position of having wider and higher priorities you still can’t see how to change it, how can you expect them to?
Valid point James, but I guess I am in a transition at the moment.
I girl I new when I was much younger had a similar attitude. I would call her a serial monogamist. By the age of 27 she has been in 25 serious relationships. We spoke somewhat on a particular day and I suggested that maybe she take some time out for a change. At that time she was in the process of setting up a new relationship and breaking up a current one. When I suggested this to her she looked at me with a puzzled look on her face and laughed, and said “that’s how you get over a relationship. You start a new one.” She was genuine with her response and this was her philosophy of dealing with loss.
So yes, I understand your point of view James. But at some point in my life (in the future) I will be faced with the harsh realities of being old and the wider and higher priorities will no longer be that accessible. What will be left at that point in my life will be the dispositions I have developed throughout my life. One of these dispositions may be looking for a distraction and sometimes what is concealed behind wider and higher priorities is simply a distraction (but not necessarily).
At the moment, my entire life has been uprooted (externally and internally).
It is a fine line between developing the internal and working within the external… and this in a nutshell is the spiritual journey.
Get a life before a wife.
And by “a life”, I mean a preoccupation with a distant and meaningful goal. If the prospective wife isn’t interested in helping you through thick and thin toward that goal regardless of her fears, worries, and angst, she isn’t a prospect.
I only mention “a wife” because of your seeming current preoccupation in thinking that women are relevant. The greater point is to get yourself very, very consumed by your own high goal, preferably one that both physically and mentally fully and momentously occupies you. If you don’t do that, you will continue to be consumed by trivial pursuits that yield no more than more angst until nothing is left.
Don’t give yourself time to hate anyone.
Thanks James, and I mean that sincerely. I have a wife and she is extremely supportive.
And yes, I agree and understand your comments and advice and it is valid and true.
A little true story: Nearby were I used to live was a man and his girlfriend who used to beg for money on the streets. Every week he would say that it was his wife’s birthday and that he wanted money to buy her some food (occasionally it was his mothers birthday). He and his girlfriend were homeless and wore raggedy clothes. Anyways, one of my friends would not drop a few bucks in his hand and would always say “get a job!”.
But this man and woman are trapped in unemployment if they don’t get a place to live, have a shower, shave, a clean set of clothes, adequate transport, and social supports. Without the foundations for employment they are destined to remain unemployed… meaning a miracle rarely falls from the sky solving all of a persons problems. There is generally a transition form one state (mental or physical) to another state (we can call this rehabilitation time).
And yes, ultimately “hate” is all consuming and needs to be avoided but there is a transition involving time and effort to move from one state to another state. I am putting in the effort but am also aware that the results of the effort will come in time (not instantly). In the meantime I am trying to use mental strategies to keep my head above water.
As I said earlier, I don’t consider hate to me an emotion (anger is an emotion). Hate, to me, is a persistent remembrance of anger connected to something. What you are suggesting is to break this cycle of remembrance (which I also agree with). But it takes time to break habits.
Long ago, when I ran across such people, I took them completely out of their situation so as to very seriously start over and provided considerable time and influence afterward for them to rebuild.
It is usually impossible to form a positive object/particle within a negative cloud. The mind/heart is a cloud of urges and thoughts. The mind must be relocated into a realm wherein there is no substantial negative so that it can reform into a positive particle/object by accumulating positive noise.
That relocation is a quick thing, best to be quick so as to make clear the distinction between the old and the new (much like moving to a new country and forgetting the old). Then there is a slow, gradual persistence in maintaining the positive while a new life grows strong (requiring that one be aware of the difference). By the time the mind/heart has grown strong and can clearly see its immediate and long term objectives, negative environments will tend to be converted by it rather than subduing it.
If grown strong enough, returning to that negative environment offers the opportunity to convert that entire environment and thus “learning, subduing, and conquering”.
The most important priority is to fully understand what you are doing and why. Next to that is the full occupation of the mind and body into the clarifying and instilling of the perception of hopes and threats, mentally and physically.
Hatred is a waste of time. If you are not subduing the adversary (not necessarily a person, preferably not), you need to be busy learning how (converting yourself).
And please forgive the lecture mode that I get tempted into too often. From my perspective, it really is all just noise.
The opposite of love is fear. Hate is fear in disguise.
I think that way of looking at it can be a help. But probably for the habit to shift accepting that the emotion is about someone external to you will be a part of it.
These hates can have parts…like:
the people judged you in a certain way, and it was unfair, but perhaps partly true. Or true but irrelevent. Or false, but you also judge yourself this way.
The way they treated you is a part of the furniture of the universe. So it can (seem to) mean things like - people will always be able to shit on me, I am the type of person who gets shit on or unfairly blamed or left to do the work and the universe/God/the government/people do not stop this or even think it is OK or just life.
Under this can be all sorts of judgments you have about yourself and here’s the tricky part. Your conscious mind may think they are simply being assholes. You can argue this out logically in your head. YOu may even be right. But there are other parts of you that actually believe you deserve to be treated that way or blamed or left holding the bag. So the conscious mind can really only accept hatred. Hatred fits with them being assholes. Underneath, the less rational parts of you, get dismissed in the dark with emotions the conscious logical mind cannot deal with since they are ‘wrong’. I think this is one way a habit gets put in place.
It cannot change, underneath feelings of anxiety come up because something makes us feel those under feelings. At a conscious level we try to resolve this by reminding ourselves they are assholes, perhaps with fantasy about revenge or anger expression. We get the anger going. This can never resolve the underlying fears and anxieties, shame and so on. It feels like if we feel those other feelings we are accepting the way we were treated or the way they judged us, but really it is accepting those parts of ourselves that think they are right or may be. Accepting their feelings, getting those parts up to speed rather than just shoving them down into some dungeon for being heretics.
I guess this is true from a Christian dualistic perspective but in many culture there are many root emotions. In these cultures fear is not included within the root emotions but is instead included within secondary emotions. But in either case, emotions are often not that easy to define or distil.
Agreed.
Agreed
Agreed
Agreed, with particular attention being placed on hopes as threats are easy to find.
Agreed
There is nothing to forgive as you have not harmed me, thanks for your kind words as they have helped somewhat.
I don’t think that that is necessarily true Ierrellus. We don’t always hate what we fear. I might come up against a bear in the wood. I would fear that bear but I certainly wouldn’t hate it. I would fear it because it threatens my existence. The men and women who fought in wars - I don’t think they necessarily hate the enemy - they may fear the enemy and it’s threat to their life but looking back, I kind of intuit that they wouldn’t feel that hate came into that equation.
My perception, one of them anyway, is that I think that sometimes hate is an unconscious reminder of what we cannot BE or of who we cannot be. So instead of recognizing the truth and the pain of that, we hate instead. Hate becomes a mask - It is our excuse, perhaps the only one we have to exercise our power, our autonomy, though it be impotent, power against someone.
The opposite of love may not necessarily be fear either - simply indifference or not being in harmony or compatible with someone.
The opposite of “loving” is “anger”.
The opposite of “sustained love” is “sustained anger” - “hate”.
Fear isn’t exactly an “emotion”. It is a reactive impulse that usually leads to an emotion. Fear is a rush to action, “presumptive response”. And thus is used to create chaos, disorder, “terrorism”, and intimidation (as is used throughout the post modern West as it was used in Nazi Germany).
Fear inspires hatred because it is traumatic.
Hope inspires devotion because it is cathartic.
Fear scatters,
Hope gathers.
Very true Moreno. Someone once said to me a while ago that it is a very easy task to see your self as you would like to be seen but a very hard task to see yourself as others see you. So yes, part of the anger/hatred/fear is fighting against the reality that others perceive me as a jerk and within their own minds this is a fact and hence their own actions towards me are justified within their minds. There then is this struggle within my own mind that they are wrong and I am not a jerk (they simply have a warped perception of me).
There is an excellent expression of this by Geshe Langri Thangpa in the poem Eight Verses of Training the Mind
[b][i]By thinking of all sentient beings
As more precious than a wish-fulfilling jewel
For accomplishing the highest aim,
I will always hold them dear.
Whenever I’m in the company of others,
I will regard myself as the lowest among all,
And from the depths of my heart
Cherish others as supreme.
In my every action, I will watch my mind,
And the moment destructive emotions arise,
I will confront them strongly and avert them,
Since they will hurt both me and others.
Whenever I see ill-natured beings,
Or those overwhelmed by heavy misdeeds or suffering,
I will cherish them as something rare,
As though I’d found a priceless treasure.
Whenever someone out of envy
Does me wrong by attacking or belittling me,
I will take defeat upon myself,
And give the victory to others.
Even when someone I have helped,
Or in whom I have placed great hopes
Mistreats me very unjustly,
I will view that person as a true spiritual teacher.
In brief, directly or indirectly,
I will offer help and happiness to all my mothers,
And secretly take upon myself
All their hurt and suffering.
I will learn to keep all these practices
Untainted by thoughts of the eight worldly concerns.
May I recognize all things as like illusions,
And, without attachment, gain freedom from bondage.[/i][/b]
Hate may begin with envy, with the fear that one is not getting what one believes he should have, but others are.
Hate may begin with envy, with the fear that one is not getting what one believes he should have, but others are.
