LOVE TO HATE You say, I hate life. But what is life? The word is such an abstraction, so amorphous, so ill-defined. And what is hate? Is hate not simply stagnated love? You hate life? You hate all of life? The vast, infinite mystery of life, all there is, was and will be, you hate the totality, you hate it all? Is it not all too vast to hate? Is hate not too small, too limited to contain life? You hate the burning sun? The first light of morning? The birdsong? The planets spinning in their ancient orbits? That sip of tea you just took? The flower outside your window? Every organism as it is born and dies? The look in your grandmothers eyes that day? Your own being? You hate your freedom to hate, to take an attitude towards life and live it? If you truly hated life you would be dead by now, friend. Hate cannot last. A part of you hasnt given up, then. A part of you must love life so much, know the joy of being awake and alive so deeply, in order for the other part to hate it, and express that hatred so freely and passionately. You dont hate life, because you are alive; you are life. You simply feel the enormous contrast now between how you are living, and how you know you can live. You must know life and love so deeply, in order to hate your present existence so much, to know how much you are shutting off from the love that is possible here, from the awesome potential at the heart of things. Hate is only a misdirected search for love, a call for radical internal transformation. Love has no opposite. It cannot be opposed, just as the sun cannot be burnt by its own light, and a shadow cannot oppose a lantern. I now realise that my hatred of life when I was young was simply my frustrated longing to awaken. I hated life because I loved it so very dearly.
Posted on: Fri, 16 May 2014 15:15:08 +0000