“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause at 9:59.) Give us a moment… This is not to be a chapter devoted to war. However, there are a few points that I do want to make. It is a sense of powerlessness that also causes nations to initiate wars. This has little to do with their “actual” world situation or with the power that others might assign to them, but to an overall sense of powerlessness — even, sometimes, regardless of world dominance.

Now: Love and hate are both based upon self-identification in your experience. You do not bother to love or hate persons you cannot identify with at all. They leave you relatively untouched. They do not elicit deep emotion.

(Slowly:) In the same way, it is possible to love your fellow human beings on a grand scale, while at times hating them precisely because they so often seem to fall short of that love. When you rage against humanity it is because you love it. To deny the existence of hate then is to deny love. It is not that those emotions are opposites. It is that they are different aspects, and experienced differently. To some extent you want to identify with those you feel deeply about. You do not love someone simply because you associate portions of yourself with another. You often do love another individual because such a person evokes within you glimpses of your own “idealized” self.

The child’s antagonism is based upon a firm understanding of its love. Parents, taught to believe that hatred is wrong, do not know how to handle such a situation. Punishment simply adds to the child’s problem. If a parent shows fear, then the child is effectively taught to be afraid of this anger and hatred before which the powerful parent shrinks. The young one is conditioned then to forget such instinctive understanding, and to ignore the connections between hatred and love.

You become conditioned so that you feel guilty when you even contemplate hating another. You try to hide such thoughts from yourself. You may succeed so well that you literally do not know what you are feeling on a conscious level. The emotions are there, but they are invisible to you because you are afraid to look. To that extent you are divorced from your own reality and disconnected from your own feelings of love. These denied emotional states may be projected outward upon others — an enemy in a war, a neighbor. Even if you find yourself hating the symbolic enemy, you will also be aware of a deep attraction.