We will now delve into the fascinating emotional states of fear, paranoia, love and hatred. We will discuss the concept of love in far greater detail in later articles.
Fear, Paranoia, Love & Hate
“Madness is eternal and a gift from the gods, remarks Plato during his discourse on love in Phaedrus, whereas sanity is man-made.”1
“Fear was not created in the beginning. Man did this himself.
Only good was created. If anything else exists it is in the mind of man.
This will be hard to learn by many, but once this has been learned, it will bring about great good.”2
“Understand the great number of entities with the so-called mental diseases being due to those entities unready mentally to face the self for the first time.”3
Fear
“If you are convinced that feelings are dangerous, then again that belief itself will generate a fear of all of them, and you may become almost panic-stricken if you display anything but the most “reasonable” calm behavior.
You are at the mercy of your emotions only when you fear them. They are the motion of your being. They go hand in hand with your intellect. But when you are unaware of the contents of your conscious mind and not fair with your emotions, you run into difficulty.
Often those who try the hardest to be “good” do so because they fear for their basic worth, and those who speak of having youthful minds and bodies do so because they are so terrified of age.
In the same way, many who shout about independence are afraid that they are basically helpless.
In most instances these opposing beliefs are held quite consciously, but kept apart from each other. Therefore they are not reconciled.
It is often not enough – in fact, seldom enough, that deep emotional fears simply be realized once or twice. They must be encountered more or less directly. Otherwise the old habits allow such fear to be buried again.
Fear, faced, and felt with its bodily sensations and the thoughts that go along with it, will automatically bring about its own state of resolution.
The conscious system of beliefs behind the impediment will be illuminated, and you will realize that you feel a certain way because you believe an idea that causes and justifies such a reaction.”4
A Frightened Person
“When people are convinced that the self is untrustworthy, for whatever reasons, or that the universe is not safe, then instead of luxuriating in the use of their abilities, exploring the physical and mental environments, they begin to pull in their realities — to contract their abilities, to over-control their environments.
They become frightened people — and frightened people do not want freedom, mental or physical.
They want shelter, a definite set of rules.
They want to be told what is good and bad.
They lean toward compulsive behavior patterns.
They seek out leaders — political, scientific, or religious who will order their lives for them.”5
Trust & Fear
“If you cannot trust your private self, then you will not trust yourself in your relationships with others or in society.
If you do not trust your private self, you will be afraid of power, for you will fear that you are bound to misuse it.
You may then purposefully put yourself in a position of weakness, while all of the time claiming that you seek influence.
Not understanding yourself, you will be in a quandary, and the mechanics of experience will appear mysterious and capricious.”6
Paranoia
“Paranoia is extremely interesting because it shows the ways in which private beliefs can distort events that connect the individual with other people.
The events are “distorted,” yet while the paranoid is convinced that those events are valid, this does not change other people’s perception of the same happenings.
What I want I to emphasize here is the paranoid’s misinterpretation of innocuous personal or mass events, and to stress the ways in which physical events can be put together symbolically, so that from them a reality can be created that is almost part physical and part dream.
You must of course interpret events in a personal manner. You create them.
Yet there is also a meeting ground of more or less shared physical encounters, a sense plateau that offers firm-enough footing for the agreement of a mass-shared world.
With most mental aberrations, you are dealing with people whose private symbols are so heavily thrust over prime sense data that even those data sometimes become almost invisible.
These individuals often use the physical world in the way that most people use the dream world, so that for them it is difficult to distinguish between a private and a publicly-shared reality.
Many such people are highly creative and imaginative.
Often, however, they have less of a solid foundation than others in dealing with a mass-shared reality, and so they attempt to impose their own private symbols upon the world, or to form a completely private world.
When I say that a person misinterprets sense data, I mean that the fine balance between mind and matter becomes over-strained in one direction.
There are, then, certain events that connect the world.
Their reality is the result of the most precise balancing of forces so that certain mental events appear quite real, and others are peripheral.
You have dusk and dawn. If in the middle of the night, and fully awake, you believe it is sunrise in physical terms, and cannot differentiate between your personal reality and the physical one, then that balance is disturbed.
The paranoid organizes the psychological world about his obsession, for such it is, and he cuts everything but that does not apply, until all conforms to his beliefs.
An examination of unprejudiced sense data at any point would at any time bring him relief.”7
A Paranoid Person
“A poor deluded man or woman is who feels, without evidence, that he or she is being pursued by creatures from space, earthly or terrestrial enemies, or evil psychic powers.
A person who feels that life has no meaning, and that his or her life in particular has no meaning, would rather be pursued than ignored.
Even the weight of guilt is better than no feeling at all.
If the paranoid might feel that he [or she] is pursued, by the government or “ungodly powers,” then at least he feels that his life must be important: otherwise, why would others seek to destroy it?
If voices tell him he is to be destroyed, then these at least are comforting voices, for they convince him that his life must have value.
At the same time, the paranoid person can use his creative abilities in fantasies that seemingly boggle the minds of the sane — and those creative abilities have a meaning, for the fantasies, again, serve to reassure the paranoid of his worth.
If in your terms he were sane, he could not use his creative abilities, for they are always connected with life’s meaning; and sane, the paranoid is convinced that life is meaningless.
Those poor people will build up for themselves a logical sequence of events, in which the most innocent encounter is turned into a frightening threat.
They will project that fear outward until they seem to meet it in each person they encounter.
Let us take a hypothetical individual — one who is convinced he has a healthy body, and is proud of mental stability. Let us call this friend Peter.
Peter [for his own reasons] may decide that his body is out to get him and punish him, rather than, say, the FBI.
He may symbolically pick out an organ or a function, and he will misinterpret many body events in the same way that another may misinterpret mass events.
Any public service announcements, so-called, publicizing symptoms connected with his sensitive area, will immediately alarm him.
He will consciously and unconsciously focus upon that part of the body, anticipating its malfunction. Our friend can indeed alter the reality of his body.
Peter will interpret such body events in a negative fashion, and as threatening, so that some quite normal sensations will serve the same functions as a fear of policemen, for example.
If he keeps this up long enough, he will indeed strain a portion of the body, and by telling others about it he will gradually begin to affect not only his personal world, but that part of the mass world with which he has contact: It will be known that he has an ulcer, or whatever.
In each case we are dealing with a misinterpretation of basic sense data.”8
To Hate
“The man who literally hates, immediately sets himself up in this fashion:
He prejudges the nature of reality according to his own limited understanding.
A man who hates always believes himself justified.
He never hates anything that he believes to be good.
He thinks he is being just, therefore, in his hatred, but the hatred itself forms a very strong claim that will follow him throughout his lives, until he learns that only the hatred itself is the destroyer.”9
Hatred
It was the Buddha who said, “Hatred will never cease by hatred at any time. Hatred ceases only through love. This is an eternal law.”
“The quicksands of fear are always behind hatred.
Left alone, hate does not last.
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.
You will be bound to those you love and those you hate, though you will learn to release and lose and dissipate the hatred.
You will learn to use even hatred creatively and to turn it to the higher ends, to transform it finally into love.
Hate, left alone, does not erupt into violence.
Hatred brings about a sense of power and initiates communication and action.
Hate is powerful if you believe in it, and yet, if you hate life, you will continue to exist.”10
Not Suppressing Hatred
“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 you own reality and disconnected from your own feelings of love.
These denied emotional states may be projected outward upon others – an enemy in a way, 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.
“I hate.” A person who says “I hate” is at least stating that he has an “I” capable of hating.
The one who says, “I have no right to hate,” is not facing his own individuality.
A man or woman who knows hate also understands the difference between that emotion and love.
The ambiguities, the contrasts, the similarities, the affirmation of the creature self, allows for the free flow of emotion.
Many disavow the experience of feelings they consider negative.
They try to “affirm” what they think of as positive emotions.
They do not permit themselves the dimensions of their creaturehood, and by pretending not to feel what they feel, they deny the integrity of their own experience.
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.
In its natural state, hatred has a powerful rousing characteristic that initiates change and action.
Regardless of what you have been told, hatred does not initiate strong violence.
The outbreak of violence is often the result of a built-in sense of powerlessness.
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.
This, however, by no means justifies the use of violence or hatred as a means of attaining peace.
In this regard, there is no justification for hatred…When you curse another, you curse yourselves, and the curse returns to you.
I would like to make it clear that there is nothing to be gained by hating hatred.
What is needed is a basic trust in the nature of vitality, and faith that all elements of experience are used for a greater good, whether or not you can perceive the way in which “evil” is transmuted into creativity.
What you love will also be a part of your experience in this life and others.”11
Love and Hatred
“Love is propelled by all of the elements of natural aggression, and it is powerful; yet because you have made such divisions between good and evil, love appears to be weak and violence strong.
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.
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 parents 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.
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.
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 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.
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 connection between hatred and love.”12
Love, Hatred & Mankind
“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.
Though sometimes you may think that you hate mankind.
You may consider people insane, the individual creatures with whom you share the planet.
You may rail against what you think of as their stupid behavior, their bloodthirsty ways, and the inadequate and short-sighted methods that they use to solve their problems.
All of this is based upon your idealized concept of what the race should be – your love for your fellow human, in other words.
But your love can get lost if you concentrate upon those variations that are less than idyllic.
When you think you hate the human race most, you are actually caught in a dilemma of love.
You are comparing the human race to your loving idealized conception of it. In this case however you are losing sight of the actual people involved.
You are putting love on such a plane that you divorce yourself from your real feelings, and do not recognize the loving emotions that are the basis for your discontent.
Your affection has fallen short of itself in your experience because you have denied the impact of this emotion, for fear that the beloved – in this case the race as a whole – will not measure up to it.
If, instead, you allowed yourself to free the feeling of love that is actually behind your dissatisfaction, then it alone would allow you to see the loving characteristics in the race that now escape your observation to a large degree.”13
Hate is Restrictive
“Love always involves freedom.
If a man says he loves you and yet denies you your freedom, then you often hate him.
Yet because of his words you do not feel justified in the emotion.
This sort of emotional tangle itself can lead to continued entanglements through various lives.
If you hate evil, then beware of your conception of the word.
Hate is restrictive.
It narrows down your perception.
It is indeed a dark glass that shadows all of your experience.
You will find more and more to hate, and bring the hated elements into your own experience.
If, for example, you hate a parent, then it becomes quite easy to hate any parents, for in their faces you see and project the original offender.
In subsequent lives you may also be drawn into a family and find yourself with the same emotions, for the emotions are the problem, and not those elements that seem to bring them about.
If you hate illness you may bring upon yourself a succeeding life of illness, because the hate has drawn it to you.
If you expand your sense of love, of health, and existence, then you are drawn in this life and in others toward those qualities because they are those upon which you concentrate.
A generation that hates war will not bring peace. A generation that loves peace will bring peace.
The most important idea to be remembered is that no one thrusts the experience of any given lifetime upon you. It is formed faithfully according to your own emotions and beliefs.
The great power and energy of love and creativity is apparent in the mere fact of your existence.”14
One way towards love is through harmony.
As Keith Critchlow wrote, “Harmony itself is the finest relationship that can be nourished between two entities. It both honors their differences yet binds them into one.”
- Michell, John, The Dimensions of Paradise
- Rogers, Walt, The Brown Notebook, 1958-1960
- Elkins, Rueckert, McCarty, The Law of One, Session 40.15, http://www.lawofone.info/results.php?s=40
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- Roberts, Jane, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1981
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1972
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- Roberts, Jane, Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1972
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1972
Recent Comments