“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Often it is akin to love, for the hater is attracted to the object of his hatred by deep bonds. It can also be a method of communication, but it is never a steady constant state, and will automatically change if not tampered with.

Give us a moment… Without going into any detail, I simply want to point out that in the United States strong national efforts were made after World War II to divert the servicemen’s energies into other areas on their return home. Many who entered that war feeling powerless were given advantages after it was over — incentives, education, benefits they did not have before it. They were given the means to power in their own eyes. They were also accepted home as heroes, and while many certainly were disillusioned, in the whole framework of the country’s mood the veterans were welcomed.

Hatred always involves a painful sense of separation from love, which may be idealized. A person you feel strongly against at any given time upsets you because he or she does not live up to your expectations. The higher your expectations the greater any divergence from them seems. If you hate a parent it is precisely because you expect such love. A person from whom you expect nothing will never earn your bitterness.

In a strange manner, then, hatred is a means of returning to love; and left alone and expressed it is meant to communicate a separation that exists in relation to what is expected.

(Pause at 11:34.) The loved one draws your best from you. In his or her eyes you see what you can be. In the other’s love you sense your potential. This does not mean that in a beloved person you react only to your own idealized self, for you are also able to see in the other, the beloved’s potential idealized self. This is a peculiar kind of vision shared by those involved — whether it be wife and husband, or parent and child. This vision is quite able to perceive the difference between the practical and the ideal, so that in ascendant periods of love the discrepancies in, say, actual behavior are overlooked and considered relatively unimportant.

Yet, in the fabric of experience, love can be predominant even while it is not static; and if so then there is always a vision toward the ideal, and some annoyance because of the differences that naturally occur between the actualized and the vision. There are adults who quail when one of their children says, “I hate you.” Often children quickly learn not to be so honest. What the child is really saying is, “I love you so. Why are you so mean to me?” Or, “What stands between us and the love for you that I feel?”

Now: I will end our session. My fondest wishes to you both, and good evening.

(“In these passages on hate, and elsewhere in this book, Seth goes more deeply into the nature of our emotional life than he has before. His earlier comments on hate, for example, were made when he had to consider the level of understanding of those who were witnessing the session. One such instance is mentioned on page 248 of The Seth Material, when, in response to a declaration by a student in my ESP class, Seth took the conventional idea of hate for granted on the part of the student. Then he answered accordingly: ‘There is no justification for hatred…. When you curse another, you curse yourselves, and the curse returns to you.’” The answer must be considered in the light of the previous conversation, in which the student was trying to justify violence as a means of attaining peace. Seth’s main concern was to refute that concept.

(“In this book, Seth leads the reader beyond conventional ideas of good and evil to a new framework of understanding. But even at these deeper levels, hate is not justified, since an honest confrontation with it will lead the individual back to the love upon which it is really based.