Was talking to someone yesterday, a friend, who stated that they 'hated' someone. Without a single thought I immediately responded with, "I don't hate anyone, no matter who they are or what they've done," and the moment I spoke this I realized just how true it is. I truly do not hate anyone, not even people who the majority of others believe deserve to be hated.
I can remember back when I used to 'hate' a lot of people. I hated pretty girls/women, I hated rich people, I hated hateful people, I hated people who exert their power over the helpless, I hated most politicians, I hated so many people from different walks of life and I even hated my childhood. I just hated at random believing all the while that somehow my hate of them would affect them in some way so that they would know they were hated and would feel badly as a result or would somehow be punished by it. I can't honestly say exactly when I made the conscious decision to stop hating people, hating situations, hating things I could not control; maybe it just happened when I stopped viewing myself as a powerless, helpless victim in life and stopped shirking responsibility for my own thoughts, feelings, words and actions. Maybe it was when I stopped blaming the people and the things around me for how I felt about them.
About ten years ago or so I truly grasped what a powerful emotion hatred is as well as how damaging it can be, most especially to the person harboring that hatred, and I made a conscious decision to stop using the word 'hate' in my vocabulary. I realized just how easily and how often I made the comment about just about everything whether important or trivial that I hated it. I hated the weather, I hated the bills I owed, I hated a movie, I hated what someone was wearing, I hated how someone looked, I hated the traffic...mainly I 'hated' just about everything and verbally confirmed that hatred so many times in a single day that I really couldn't count all the times I said that I 'hated' something. Maybe I felt as if hate wasn't that bad and it's okay to feel hatred for things, for people, for situations, etc. because it's just a part of being human, right? OR maybe it was that I realized that it was a 'learned' response to things that I wasn't comfortable with from growing up in a society, and maybe even a home, where hating was accepted and flowed through life as if hating things was a normal part of life for everyone everywhere.
We've all seen hatred and many of us have experienced the power of hatred in our lives. We've been hated or maybe we've hated someone else and always it seems to the detriment of our own selves. When we are the victim of hatred of course it's detrimental to us. Sometimes we don't even understand 'why' we are hated by someone else or what we may have possibly done to earn their hatred and sometimes we know exactly why someone hates us. Regardless, many of us have felt the pain of being hated or even disliked by another human being. I guess then that would beg the question why any of us who have felt the weight and the pain of being hated by someone else would ever choose to inflict that same thing on another living human being. What a conundrum that is but apparently not one that many people consider in their lifetimes considering how many decent, loving, caring and seemingly aware and awake people express hatred toward things or people almost on a daily basis.
So is it inherently 'wrong' to hate? I'm sure that many people, especially those who express hatred for other people and things in their lives, would say that it's not inherently wrong and that in fact it's just a natural human emotion that everyone experiences. But perhaps what those who feel hatred is natural and is acceptable to harbor within ourselves are neglecting to admit is the power of hatred to destroy us; to destroy the people we or others hate, to support systematic hatred on an institutional level, to drive peoples to wage war on the other groups of people who are objects of their hatred, to limit how successful certain people can be in life, to drive some people with extreme hatred for others to subjugate them and even kill them as if their lives are not of any value simply because those hated are the object of the haters hatred (as if the victims are the sole cause of the hate waged against them). When one reflects, if one chooses to do so honestly, one can very quickly and easily see the weight of hatred on our world throughout history and today. One also must admit, if they choose to be honest with themselves, that as a emotion hatred carries quite a bit of 'energy' with it and that when we ourselves choose to feel and experience the emotion of hatred that we are adding to the weight and the force of the cumulative hatred being felt and expressed in the world today.
So, there's a 'payoff' for everything that we human beings do. There's no feeling we feel, no thoughts or words we choose to have and express, there's no action that we take or thing that we do that doesn't give us some sort of payoff on an emotional level. The payoff for everyone is going to be different based on who we are but still there's some sort of payoff, be it self-satisfaction or validation or to prove something to someone or to just make us feel superior or good in some way. Maybe my payoff for hating in the past was to help myself feel superior and just a bit maybe because back then I felt powerless in a way and felt that hating those or that which I felt powerless about was a great defense against them or it. But when I got honest with myself and really took a look at the kind of human being that I wanted to be in this life I realized that hate just wasn't a part of it; hate couldn't make me stronger, hate couldn't destroy my enemies, hate couldn't change a single thing and hate couldn't comfort me. That is why I stopped hating and saying I hate things; even if I really didn't hate something but just used that word out of habit and because so many other people use it.
In the end hate is not just a 'word' people use to express their discomfort or disgust with something or someone. Hate is an emotion and ALL emotions carry weight and power in them adding to the collective energy that flows through everything that happens in the world. What kind of contribution do we want to make to the energy of the world? What kind of energy do we want to add to the energy of the rest of life on planet earth? Do we 'really' hate all the things that we say we hate or do we just use the word because it's easy, it's there, everyone else uses it and it's a habit? Then IF we really DO hate even half of the things that we say we hate how does it affect the object of our hatred, if at all, and how does it make us feel about our place in the world or our own personal security, our own happiness?
In closing I'd just like to share a thought about hate. Carrie Fisher, the actress (Princess Leia of Star Wars), expressed her thoughts about resentment many years ago that still hangs around today and is embraced by many as the rock solid truth. Although her reference was 'resentment' we all have to acknowledge that hatred is truly a form of resentment toward another person or a thing so I think her sentiment holds true and applies to hate. The sentiment goes like this:
“Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”
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