“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.

Now: Love is also a great inciter to action, and utilizes dynamos of energy.

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.

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.

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.

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…

In personal contact, you can be quite aware of an enduring love for another person, and still recognize moments of hatred when separations of a kind exist that you resent because of the love you know involved.

(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.

(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.

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.

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?”

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.

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.

A fantasy of beating a parent or a child, even to death, will if followed through lead to tears of love and understanding.

(“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.