Hatred and Delusive Certainty

I ended my post yesterday with this inspiring quote from Martin Luther King, Jr:

‘Hating someone will destroy you, not the people you are hating. If you‘re in a place of hating someone, you need to let go. Choose love over hate.’

I’ve also heard King quoted as saying to a group about to engage in civil disobedience: ‘If we hate the people who hate us, they have won.’ King’s concern with our hearts, with our inner landscape, was a fully aligned with Gandhi’s understanding of nonviolence as not just a political expediency, but as a way of being. Gandhi was adamant that the path of nonviolence is only effective if the participants have done the necessary inner work.

Gandhi himself continually returned to his own spiritual community for rest and renewal between his many travels and conversations and actions. Daily meditation and regular fasting were part of his everyday life. Gandhi also called off several large scale campaigns of civil disobedience when violent incidents made it clear that the partisans of his cause were not yet able to live up to the demands of nonviolent action, that they had not found yet found a way through the tangle of their own inner hatreds and violence.

That’s a high bar for engagement.

Yesterday, I was caught by King’s words: ‘If you’re in a place of hating someone, you need to let go. Choose love over hate.’ This is inspiring advice and it sounds quite simple, but how do we do it?

I don’t think many people consciously choose hate over love, but we are always beset by the seduction of righteous certainty—the mirror side of hatred. The human mind loves the feeling of certainty. The mind was apparently designed to solve problems and move on. Uncertainty requires the ongoing energy of wondering and not knowing. And while we may generally be in favor of the idea of wondering, in practice, not knowing can be very taxing. Part of the brain simply wants to clear space in our consciousness for the next problem. Being certain, even if we are wrong, is often accompanied with a sense of relief and ease.

The brain cannot distinguish between its view of reality and reality itself. Stephen Covey once said ‘We see the world not as it is, but as we are, or as we were conditioned to see it.’ We live in a world that we unconsciously participate in creating. We live with strong psychic pressure to clarify things into black and white so we can move on to the next problem. Once we know that we are the good guys and they are the bad guys, we settle into certainty.

Consequently, hate and its near relatives of blame, resentment and righteousness often feel quite good. I mean they don’t feel good, but they are solid positions that allow us to create a sense of a stable self. And on some level, the brain only wants to create a stable sense of itself and the world—it often cares more about resolution than whether the resolution is accurate, beneficial or even if it really makes sense.

From the Zen perspective, the self—who we think we are—is the subject of great interest. As we look more closely at our actual experience, it’s quite hard to find the self who is allegedly at the center of it all. I might reasonably say, ‘I am writing these words on my laptop.’ But who is the one who is writing these words? I respond, ‘I am having thoughts that I’m typing onto the keyboard.’ But who is the one having these thoughts? Words and thoughts are certainly arising in my awareness, but where are they coming from? Who is the one who is doing the thinking? Who is doing the typing? To say, ‘I am.’ begs the question. Who is this ‘I’ that ‘I’ talk about so often? If I’m honest, I have to admit that I have no idea who is at the center of it all. There are thoughts. There is typing. There is wondering. That’s all I can really vouch for.

While this may sound interesting, it can be quite unsettling when we begin to realize that we really don’t know who we are on this fundamental level—that this self and personal history that we will go to extreme lengths to defend, is not as solid as we would like to believe. And this is not just academic because this unconscious urge to solidify the self is at the core of the hatred and self-righteousness that tear us apart.

The urgent work of our country and the urgent work of our planet is to find ways to cut through the separation of certainty that leads to hatred, violence and endless suffering. Courage is required to do the necessary work of the moment—courage to face our own internal demons and delusive certainties as well as courage to take action and stand up for justice, accountability and compassion.

These are not easy times, but these are times of great opportunity—to step beyond whatever bubble we have been living in, into the great diversity, confusion and vividness of life itself. We are called to do this for ourselves, for our brothers and sisters, and for this fragile planet that is part of who we are.