Dispassionate Hatred

Picking up the theme from yesterday's brief post, it is not as if life without the left would somehow be paradise. Rather, the problem is man, and man only. Thus, the left is just like man, only worse. It simply exaggerates what is worst in man -- envy, ingratitude, entitlement, pettiness, perversion, dishonesty, etc. -- and then turns it into virtue before going on to subsidize it.

For the spiritually awake, one of the most subtly dangerous aspects of the left is that it makes it so easy to feel superior. I alluded to this in yesterday's post, and it's a real temptation. When Jesus enjoins us to love the enemy, he is conveying a deeper lesson than just Unreasonable Niceness.

Rather, if not done in the proper spirit, criticism can become a covert vehicle to elevate and exalt the self. Hatred would be just an extreme case: it is as if by hating the object, we unconsciously justify ourselves, such that God's forgiving grace is not needed.

I would even go so far as to say that -- so long as we have deeply internalized the lesson above -- we are free to hate what is properly hateful. But few people can pull this off without the thrill of auto-salvation. It is analogous to, say, a saint being able to sleep in a bed full of naked supermodels and not have a lustful thought, even while appreciating their beauty. The point is, the spontaneous aversion of hatred can be a kind of dispassionate discernment, but it rarely is.

I have only to think back on my own irrational hatreds of the past to see how this works. I suppose I hated Reagan at the time. Certainly I agreed with all the hateful things the left said about him and about conservatives more generally, which automatically placed me on a plane of completely unmerited, even delusional, superiority -- as when, say, a squalid creature such as Al Sharpton rebukes an Antonin Scalia.

So, it's preferable to just hate without being hateful, i.e., to not enjoy that secret thrill of hating. In ten years of blogging, I can't recall ever making an angry comment to a troll. Rather, I find a way to make them appear ridiculous.

What was the real Last Temptation of Christ? Perhaps it was the temptation to hate his executioners, otherwise why ask the Father to forgive them? Likewise, forgive Justice Kennedy, because he is utterly without a clue.

One book that really gets deeply into this whole discernment-of-hatred business is Christ the Eternal Tao. The key principle, if I recall correctly, is that we all have a higher and lower nature, and that it is the task of the higher to detach -- or distance, rather -- itself from the lower, so as to observe it without being caught up in it.

In a certain sense, this goes to the distinction between our animal and properly human natures. For example, why do we wear clothing instead of going about naked, as they do in San Francisco? What's the big deal? What's your hang-up? In the Jewish tradition, the purpose of clothing is to elevate us above the beasts. Which is why San Francisco is so bestial.

Man is composed of body, soul, and spirit; or soma, psyche, and pneuma. It is possible for one's being to be conditioned from the bottom up, when the whole freaking point -- at least in the Judeo-Christian view -- is to be conditioned from the top down so as to humanize the animals we are (not to animalize the human, which is literally the project of the left. Which I can affirm with no hatred whatsoever).

As we have discussed in the past, man has two sets of defense mechanisms, one against the lower, the other against the higher. Few animal types can successfully sink all the way down to animality.

Take the example of an ACLU lawyer, defending the right of a high school student to wear a t-shirt saying SUCK MY DICK. I am waiting for the day one of these pasty-faced legal adventurers has the courage of his convictions and wears such shirt to court. But most liberals do not practice what they preach, or they would be as dysfunctional as the people who actually live liberal ideas, as in the inner cities.

You could say there are three main attractors in the human state: call them unconscious, ego, and supra-conscious. In Vedanta they are called sattva, rajas, and tamas (the gunas), for these are an expression of universal metaphysics. In short, there are luminous and "ascending" types, just as there are tenebrous and descending types. The middle area is not necessarily "bad," as these can be positively expansive types. Furthermore, everyone has a mixture of the three, with one guna typically predominating.

People who are spontaneously attracted to God are likely of an ascending nature. Conversely, most people who are spontaneously attracted to politics are of a rajasic nature -- say, Bill Clinton, who is rajas-tamasic all the way down. There is no higher in him, only its facsimile. Obama is an even more dangerous case, for he was elected on the basis of a kind of meretricious sattva ("the Lightbringer"), which is an inverse analogy of hell. Which I say with no hatred in my heart.

From Christ the Eternal Tao: the wrong kind of condemnation "is a kind of mechanism which the ego uses in order to immediately exalt itself over something or someone..." But "When we are truly humble and in submission to God, it is possible to discern right from wrong without judging or condemning."

In other words, it is possible to be godly without presuming to be God. This egoic judgment is wrong to the extent that it is "made in order to feel more right than the person whom we have judged." It blocks the path to God, as opposed to dilating it via humility.

Metanoia -- the second birth -- is really a reorientation to the Great Attractor. "Along with this comes the yearning... for that which separates us from Him to be removed..." And "We know that our metanoia is genuine -- that is, that a Divine change has really occurred in us -- when we have a revulsion for what before appeared sweet to us."

I don't know about you, but my old self not only nauseates me, but I am always mindful that there but for the grace of God...

Which is what occurs to me when dealing with a troll, as in yesterday's post. "[W]e still carry within ourselves the inclination and habit to return to our former condition." For example, I could have a head injury, or a stroke, and somehow regress to my former self, and I don't think it would be right to hate me for that, but rather, to have compassion.

Looked at this way, it is as the Tao says -- something to the effect of, "What is a bad man but a good man's teacher?" Each one is a kind of object lesson which we should learn in all humility. Trolls are stepping stones to our better selves. When Jesus says "resist not evil," I don't think he means to just "let it go," but rather, to rise above it, i.e., do not engage it on its own level.

Here again, this is one thing that really impresses about Churchill. He did what was necessary to eradicate evil without getting caught up in the pleasure of being superior to fascists. But now we are denied not only the pleasure, but even the superiority over our Islamic enemy. For the left, the only permissible pleasure is the participation in our own well deserved destruction.