Hatred as Beauty

THE BEAUTY OF HATRED

I'm going to say something very spiritually incorrect.

It is okay to hate. Or rather, the energy of hatred, when it arises in your present experience, when it burns fiercely in your belly, chest, throat, head, is not an energy to dismiss, or deny, or destroy, or be ashamed of. That would just add another layer of resistance to the living moment. Hate is a valid movement of life, a vibrant wave in the vast ocean of things. It is something in you that just wants to be felt, allowed, embraced as part of a bigger picture of reality.

It is a lost child, wandering in the darkness, seeking your light.

Note, I am not talking about 'acting upon' the energy of hate, blaming others for the way you feel, destroying others to find your own peace, but deeply allowing that powerful energy to move in you, letting it stay as long as it needs to stay, and burn as long as it needs to burn, and dissolve in its own time. When you acknowledge that hate is in you but do not identify with it, when you allow yourself to feel and honour its power and don't run away from it or judge it as 'bad' or 'evil' or 'destructive', when you allow those powerful forces to dance, you may discover one of the most profound truths about reality:

Hate is not the opposite of love. Love has no opposite. Love is so vast and timeless that it cannot be opposed or destroyed, just as the words in a book, however violent or intense, cannot harm the pages themselves. It is the light that knows no darkness, and its shadows have no power of their own. It would allow the energy of hate to burn within it, and embrace it as its own child, unconditionally so. Thus the hate is rendered powerless, and seen to be a fierce expression of love and its longing.

Nobody has ever hated anyone or anything. We have only been seeking love in desperate ways.

Here is an invitation to discover a love so huge that it would be willing to feel hatred towards 'another', and to know that this has nothing to do with the 'other' at all! They are innocent! Nobody is to blame! Discover that you are life itself, and ALL of life's energies can flow through you, come home to you, rest in your embrace!

Simply put, you can love another so much that you suddenly allow yourself to hate them ("them"), for you are willing to let even that energy in. You are willing to drop all your images of yourself, the 'nice and good boy or girl', or the 'perfect and enlightened spiritual being', images that are dead and second-hand, and always have been. You are willing to cease trying to hold it all together, and you let it all fall apart, for Truth, for realness.

Sometimes you have to feel hatred burning inside you to remember that you are alive, and sensitive, and open, and capable of holding huge things, capable of giving birth to universes, and in the midst of the hatred you discover a love so deep and radical that it silences the mind and breaks the heart clean open.

You thought you hated. In reality, you loved so very deeply. That is why you were able to hate at all.

Seen in this awakened light, even hate can be a gateway to love, if you are willing to look inside, and leave the paradigm of guilt, blame and retribution, and seeking peace outside yourself, and come closer to what you actually feel in the moment.

For when you are willing to feel hate's power, to honour the life in it, to bow before it, to dignify it with your loving attention, it cannot coagulate or solidify into "I hate you".

And perhaps you will look back, and realise that it was never 'hate' at all, for that is just a concept you picked up at kindergarten. It was love, ingeniously disguised, calling, beckoning, whispering, "I am still here! I am still here!".

And so you can say to a friend, and a friend can say to you, "I have discovered that love is not a finite commodity, nor a fleeting feeling, nor a task at which I can fail or succeed. It is a living field, a field that embraces and endures, and, in the moment, you can hate me with every fibre of your being, and I you, yet the field remains, and we are held there in our pain and our sacredness, always..."

- Jeff Foster