Greetings,

This month we are going to look at the second aspect of the Three Poisons - Hatred. Hatred is a harsh word and many of you may find it difficult to use. You may be tempted to use a lesser word, like aversion or resistance, but I invite you to stick with this word, hatred, for the full month. The poisonous nature of this aspect of the Three Poisons is very difficult to relate to if you label it resistance or aversion. This is true mostly because we live in a world that demands so much resistance from us. There's so much going on that we are forever in resistance of what seems like casual violence, sarcasm, over-consumption, complacency, excessive intrusion into our private lives and wanton discrimination. As practitioners, many of us feel compelled to put up these protective barriers to both shield ourselves from this current aggression and to assert our alignment with the Dhamma. In this post, however, I hope I can distinguish between the poisonous nature of resistance when it is tied to hatred rather than sila (ethical conduct).

Hatred as an underlying tendency is the reason why we constantly seek pleasure. Our minds are natural threat matrixes which means that it is always on guard for anything that can be considered dangerous. Any type of painful experience is therefore considered dangerous to our mind and demands that we correct it. We, in effect, become enjoined with the painful experience because of this obsession with danger. What I'm pointing to is not about any particular person; it is about the nature of the mind we are dealing with, or the essence of our ordinary mind. This ordinary mind takes anything unpleasant and turns it into something dangerous. It is rational and practical to push away, resist, get rid of, get away from anything and everything that's dangerous. In fact, we need a hatred level intensity to deal with dangerous situations.

The problem is that not every situation where we experience unpleasantness is in fact dangerous. I'd say 99.9% of our unpleasant experiences are not even close to being dangerous. The mind, however, is using a hatred level intensity to respond to something that is simply unpleasant. This is what the picture is pointing to. The emoji in the middle is hatred. That's the energy level we are using to respond to situations involving the five surrounding emojis.

The five surrounding emojis are our ordinary reactions to life - boredom, confusion, skepticism, indifference, irritation, and fear. There are actually hundreds of these kinds of responses. They are all a form of resistance. If we think of them as simply a response to a situation, they can all seem very rational. For instance, meditation is boring. That's very rational. Feeling indifferent about who wins the election can be seen as rational or practical. Getting irritated or afraid by politics can seem like the right and necessary response. Being confused by all the changes going on with AI, social media, and the overall tech world makes perfect sense. Skepticism, worry, checking out - these are all natural and rational reactions to the world we live in given the amount of pressure we are facing.

Practicing with hatred is not about judging, comparing, or fixing our natural responses to circumstances. Investigating hatred is looking at how enjoined or invested you are in getting rid of, pushing away, or resisting the situation or some opposing view or some thought about the past or future. Is your response at a hatred level intensity? Can you be bored and stay with it? Can you accept irritation without having to change the thing that's irritating you? Is it ok for someone to hold a view that really bothers you? The point of practicing with hatred is to begin to see how vested you are in things being the way you want them to be and/or how much control you're willing to assert to get rid of what you don't want.

This is what we're going to look at this month. We just want to see how intense our "not wanting" gets. To help us practice with this we use the wholesome roots of being as kind as we can, doing the least amount of harm and using a degree of restraint to stay present with whatever is arising. Above all, stay away from blaming, shaming and judging what you see. This is all about learning to discern the presence and absence of hatred. To do this we will need to be with resistance responses. We will need to get used to the felt sense of resistance and let it be.

With a deep bow...

Tuere