Looking at "hate"

Be not afraid to look upon the special hate relationship, for freedom lies in looking at it.
ACIM-T: 16:IV:1:1

WTF(front door) are you talking about? Isn't this suppose to be a peace seeking blog and here you are encouraging us to look at hate??? What is wrong with you woman?

On the outside...there is a lot wrong with me lol but we are not here to discuss that...that would take a novel or two. Let's talk a bit about the special relationship instead.

I am reading Byron Katie again and revisiting some of her exercises that she calls The work...that which attempts to bring us back to "Truth". I don't really have to answer all the questions she encourages the reader to answer when one is feeling a bit "hateful" towards another to get to the bottom line but I do it anyway. After spending a few moments on it this morning, as I question the resentment I feel towards a loved one...I open to this page literally.  Go figure.

You too  may be feeling annoyed with someone you love.  They may not be meeting your expectations  and either passively or aggressively (or passive-aggressively :)) you are shoulding them to death...right?  "He should know how I feel!"  "She should be more considerate!"  "You shoud not do those things, would not do those things if you truly loved me!"  etc etc etc. If not dealt with,  the resentment can turn into a type of hate and your special love relationship begins to show it's other side which was a part of it all along.

You can not limit hate. The special love relationship will not offset it, but will merely drive it underground and out of sight. It is essential to bring it into sight, and to make no attempt to hide it.  For it is the attempt to balance hate with love that makes love meaningless to you. ACIM:T:16:IV:1:5-9

Yes... "hate" is a strong word but if we are going to use the term "love" in our specially selected relationships with certain individuals at the exclusion of others...eventually we will have to use the word "hate" too. This idea of "love" is an illusion.  It is not based on "true love" which is unconditional love for what is. 

If, in my relationships, I love when the person offers me what I feel is necessary to make me happy and I withdraw that love when they no longer give it to me, and maybe even attempt to punish them in some way for not giving me what I feel they "should" ...then that is really a special hate relationship. ...isn't it?

Katie tells people to gather up their resentments and write  them down.  She, in a sense, encourages people to explore their "hate".  She then gets them, in a step by step process,  to see the truth beneath that hate, that anger, disappointment and resentment...to see the love that is not based on how a person acts or what they are. In a way, she takes people beyond the illusion of love to the truth of it, by exploring what we hate.

Real love is not an illusion meant to cover up hate. Hate is the illusion! And sometimes we believe in that hate and create a version of love ( that is not real) to balance that hate. When our illusion of love  falls through we tend to blame, punish, make guilty the people we have given that illusion to. In other words...we expect people we have special relationships with to take away all our negative and hateful feelings...to make us "happy"...We believe they "should". When they are less than successful at doing so we judge, we resent, we get angry, we seek to punish in one form or another. We close up and withdraw our love, if only temporarily . Is that not hate?

So in The work...which is just one way of doing this...we get beyond illusion to truth, beyond hate to love. Katie asks, " Is it true?  Can you absolutely know for certain that it is?"  These are questions we can all ask ourselves when we find ourselves slipping into any form of  hate and resentment over others.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. It is not necessary to seek for what is true, but it is necessary to seek for what is false. ACIM:T:16:IV:6:1-2

All is well in my world.


ACIM

Byron Katie (2002) Loving What Is. New York: Three Rivers Press