Being struck by hate

Virginia hitting me in my house Madrid 2012

To those who are being struck by hate

To hate to be hated

He could feel those expressions in her eyes. He understood that everything was over but he tried to handle the situation just by speaking with her honestly. She felt a deep anger in her soul and the only thing she wanted to do was to hit him. Since a long time ago the tenuous threads of communication had broken between them. Now only the hatred remains. Everything began when one of them started to become frightened of losing something. Who began first? When hatred is generated without us being conscious of it, it is more difficult to repair it. Ignorance, distrust, doubts, and finally fear. Fear leads to ire, ire leads to hatred and hatred leads to suffering.

Fighting against hate

If love is what we are looking for as we begin to discover ourselves in this life, hatred will be what we don’t want to find anywhere. This is the definition of hate you can find in Wikipedia:” It’s a deep and emotional extreme dislike that can be directed against individuals, entities, objects or ideas. Hatred is often associated with feelings of anger and a disposition towards hostility. Commonly held moral rules, such as the Golden Rule, oppose universal hatred towards another.”

It seems that when we offer love to others, to the environment in which we live, this love returns to us in different ways. People who dedicate their entire life to take care of others, who share their time working as volunteers in an NGO usually speak about it and usually tell us that they receive more than they offer. Maybe it is owing to what Einstein said: “We live in the world when we love. Only a life lived for the others is worth being lived.”  On the other hand, you can see people who are destroying themselves by the hatred they hold within, maybe because love and hate are being governed by the same rule: the more you offer the more you will receive. So people who are spending their time hating others owing to any kind of fears are people who usually suffer a lot, people who don’t know the meaning of their life and people who look for pleasure because they don’t know what happiness is. You will get what you offer.

The gift of feeling struck by hatred

How can we face people who hate us? Don’t underestimate the instance in which you discover that someone hates you, because it is a gift. This moment allows you to connect with the global emotion that a lot of people are feeling right now and throughout history. Being struck by hate even though you think that you do not deserve it, allows you to be a Jew in Nazi Germany, a black person in the cotton fields of the southern USA many years ago, a Pakistani man crossing India, a Tutsi in Ruanda in the nineties, a Christian walking to Mecca or a muslin praying in the middle of the Vatican State. There are a lot of people that are being hated unjustly and with extreme cruelty, and by sharing this feeling we are able to understand how important love is.

All of us are part of one

Luo Marinoff, the author of Plato, Not Prozac said: “Hatred is the major poison of the mind.” We already know how small this world is, the connections that are needed if two people want to meet each other have been reduced considerably.  Now more than ever we are part of one and hating someone else is more or less the same as hating yourself. If we realise that we are part of everything, to hate another is so absurd as the right leg hating the left one. In order to live in harmony with the environment in which we live and with ourselves, it is necessary to recognise that hatred is the element that destabilises us the most, whereas love and compassion are the fundamental components.