Hate

Excerpted from “The Sacred Dictionary,” which highlights the living meaning carried by a single word

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference…” - Elie Wiesel

hate = haton (Proto-Germanic), ked (Indo-European) 

kédos (Greek), sorrow, care, funeral rites, kad (Avestan), grief, cas (Welsh), pain, anger

I hate to say it- we all hate!  Some of us hate people who aren't loving,  or who aren’t loving us.  Hatred is a common response to the intolerable frustration that comes from feeling power-lessened, or loved less than we long for, whether by our Selves or another.  Hate attempts to destroy what pains us, a force fullness that seeks to impose peace from what we cannot will our Selves to accept. The e motion of hatred runs on exhaustive fuming which drains the capacity to clearly see our shared humanity. 

We tend to hate what we fear rather than tending to the fear itself, often designating what we don’t know as ‘different,’ or ‘other.’ Hate is a form of love gone livid, a combustible grief with no outlet, a pseudo-power fed by the suppression of regressive aggression whose compression dulls the details, indiscriminately discriminating and desensitizing our common senses.  We see an other instead of Another Oneness.

Such marred vision is a byproduct of trauma. Traumas of neglect often result in detachment from desire, dispassionately separating us from our aspirations.  Why bother hoping for something that never comes?   Being in difference effectively inures the Survival Self to remain safely separate from the collective, protectively rejecting connection.  It is a complacent numbness to Oneness that prevents us from claiming our sameness.

Indifference insulates us from the distress of our unmet longing for reciprocal Love.  In difference, we forget fully that we All belong. Toughened by the not-enoughness we felt as children, we become full of care not to care too much lest we lessen our facade of adopted apathy.

How then, to disrupt the destructive impulses that harden hope?  How do we harvest the vitality of rage while mitigating its nihilistic bent?  

By acknowledging what is, including what we wish wasn’t. Acknowledgment. Acting on the knowledge meant for you prevents projecting it onto others. When we invite what has been excluded- pain-filled thoughts, feelings, longings - back into our fold, they can be tended and nourished by the Whole. 

If we are willing to examine and be with our hates rather than unleash them,  if we stay with them long enough to feel their origins                                                                                                              eventually                                                                                                                                                  their reactive contraction relaxes                                                                                                              gradually                                                                                                                                                    thawing grief                                                                                                                                              restoring holy                                                                                                                                           

In deference to our differentiation                                                                                                            May we allow All of us to matter