I invite more YouTube essayists to join me in talking about the varieties of speech and what if anything to do about them. Not that I get into any of that in my latest YouTube (above).
We talk about love a lot in Christianity and in that way sound a lot like garden variety mystics of the type people celebrate, because love has a feel good hallmarky quality, that goes with scented candles and memento gift shops. But what about hate?
What the psychologists understood pretty quickly, in making "soul studies" a science (bypassing the quantum mechanics behind it all), was that hypocrisy and projection are interlinked.
Hatred directed towards the self is considered unhealthy (warning to the reader: I'll be taking issue with that), whereas hatred towards others might even be OK if they deserve it. So a first move of the psyche (soul) is to take a quality or trait one would hate to find in oneself (such as homophobia) and puts it out there in those others (those homophobes). Hate is thereby transmuted, in the sense of redirected.
What I'd say from my pulpit is love and hatred aren't that far apart, certainly they're close in Hilbert Space in that talk of one is oft in close proximity to talk of the other. They co-define, as concepts do. We don't really hate our little brother, we love him, but he drives us crazy. Others "make us" (the victim tense) jealous and we may hate them too. Or is it that others hate and we must do penance for our jealousy by defending its target? That sounds twisted.
A more Buddhist approach is simply to focus on the bare phenomenon of hate, if that's feasible. Distill a pure sample if you have the hormones for it, the calzones (hah hah), and now ask yourself where does fear come into play. But even before that: doesn't hate entail commitment? "At least you cared" is what the newly bulletholed newlywed says to the camera.
I've many times resurfaced Maurice Nicoll in these blog posts. That's the Jungian Scot who admired and relayed Ouspensky's teachings, in turn acquired from rubbing shoulders with (sometimes fighting with) Gurdjieff. His work was to gather successful adults together and have them go through some group therapy process, we could call it, wherein management of the psyche would be a core focus. Where do "negative emotions" as he called them, come from?
Just having the self monitoring skills to detect and label what's arising is going to help with the self training. Is what I'm experiencing "negative" or not? The other question being: "who is this 'I' that does the judging"?
Still at my pulpit, I'd look for times when hatred felt pure and not like some hot potato that others must feel, poor sinners, bless their hearts. Own the hate, maybe by calling it something else. It's so hard to not prejudge where love versus hate is concerned. How about "fury"? You're furious. Own your fury. That's a good bumper sticker. Now replace "fury" with "voltage pressure" and look up "teleology" in the Synergetics Dictionary (a real thing, you can find it online).
In Gnostic terms, I might say hatred is a measure of God's commitment, and maybe a lesser god, say an angel is channeling it, say a demon, a type of angel in our cult's taxonomy (I'm making up a cult as we go). A demon is hate inspired, we could say relatively purely, which accounts for the immortality, meaning the eternal validity, of what moves them, ultimately love. God's, not yours, not to worry if you're in fury mode.
