“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: Dictation. (Slowly, to begin:) Left alone, hate does not last.

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.

Hate, left alone then, does not erupt into violence. Hatred brings a sense of power and initiates communication and action. In your terms it is the build up of natural anger; in animals, say, it would lead to a face-to-face encounter, of battle stances in which each creature’s body language, motion, and ritual would serve to communicate a dangerous position. One animal or the other would simply back down. Growling or roaring might be involved.

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.

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.

Love, therefore, can contain hate very nicely. Hatred can contain love and be driven by it, particularly by an idealized love. (Pause.) You “hate” something that separates you from a loved object. It is precisely because the object is loved that it is so disliked if expectations are not met. You may love a parent, and if the parent does not seem to return the love and denies your expectations, then you may “hate” the same parent because of the love that leads you to expect more. The hatred is meant to get you your love back. It is supposed to lead to a communication from you, stating your feelings — clearing the air, so to speak, and bringing you closer to the love object. Hatred is not the denial of love, then, but an attempt to regain it, and a painful recognition of circumstances that separate you from it.

(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.

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: Often you are taught not only to repress verbal expression of hate, but also told that hateful thoughts are as bad as hateful actions.

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.

A bond of hate will unite you, but the bond was originally based upon love. In this case however you aggravate and exaggerate all those differences from the ideal, and focus upon them predominantly. In any given case all of this is consciously available to you. It requires only an honest and determined attempt to become aware of your own feelings and beliefs. Even your hateful fantasies, left alone, will return you to a reconciliation and release love.

(“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.

(“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.”)