“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

If you believe that hate is wrong and evil, and then find yourself hating someone, you may try to inhibit the emotion or turn it against yourself — raging against yourself rather than another. On the other hand you may try to pretend the feeling out of existence, in which case you dam up that massive energy and cannot use it for other purposes.

On their return home the code of behavior changed back to one suited to civilian life, and they clamped down upon themselves again as hard as they could. Many would appear as superconventional. The “luxury” of expressing emotion even in exaggerated form was suddenly denied them, and the sense of powerlessness grew by contrast.

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.

If you understood the nature of love you would be able to accept feelings of hatred. Affirmation can include the expression of such strong emotions. Give us a moment…

Dogmas or systems of thought that tell you to rise above your emotions can be misleading — even, in your terms, somewhat dangerous. Such theories are based upon the concept that there is something innately disruptive, base, or wrong in man’s emotional nature, while the soul is always depicted as being calm, “perfect,” passive and unfeeling. Only the most lofty, blissful awareness is allowed. Yet the soul is above all a fountain of energy, creativity, and action that shows its characteristics in life precisely through the ever-changing emotions.

(11:22.) Trusted, your feelings will lead you to psychological and spiritual states of mystic understanding, calm, and peacefulness. Followed, your emotions will lead you to deep understandings, but you cannot have a physical self without emotions any more than you can have a day without weather.

(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.

Love is of course always changing. There is no one [permanent] state of deep mutual attraction in which two people are forever involved. As an emotion love is mobile, and can change quite easily to anger or hatred, and back again.

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.

(“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 using the word ‘curse,’ Seth is not referring to swearing, but to directing hatred against another. Until the individual comes to terms with himself and his emotions, the hatred will return, because it belongs to the one who hates and not to anyone else. The earlier instructions on handling emotions, in Chapter Eleven, provide a framework in which hate can be faced and understood. Also important in this context is Seth’s frequent reminder that the expression of normal aggression prevents the buildup of anger into hatred.”)