The Rotten Root of Hate and the Route Out….

God is Love. Love is our True nature. If we want to be autonomous, we must reject God, and therefore reject Love. So we twist Love into hate, and call ourselves individuals in our own right.

But the small self, the shrunken self, is a prison, and we “know” that and hate it. We all have the memory of who we really are. That is why we long for something more: we know that we are more than “who we are”. But we run from this awareness. We run outside, even further away from the Self.

Self-hate is an unavoidable outcome of ignorance, “I”-ness, attraction, repulsion, and clinging to life. Put another way, our self-hate arises through our mistaken identification with imperfection, separateness, and doership.

Inherent in our self-loathing is the awareness that what we hate, we actually “know” is not who we really are. We hate, however, for the wrong reason. We believe we hate ourselves because we can’t be happy, and therefore go outside ourselves looking for that happiness. But in truth, we hate ourselves because we know that our unhappiness arises from our not being who we really are. We always do “remember” our True nature.

But we work to forget. Ironically, we hold onto our small selves because we hate ourselves too much. We cling to what we hate so that we might forget the real reason we hate it. The choice to be infinitely less than who we really are is so painful that we turn even further outside, and project our self-hate onto and into the world. When we turn inward we see our self-hate, so we turn outward and project that hate elsewhere. Our self-hate informs everything—even what we tell ourselves is love.

We created this prison. We diminished ourselves. So we believe we are freeing ourselves by projecting out of ourselves. But we are going the wrong way. We will have to go through the self-hate of the non-self in order to get back to the Self. Hate is just twisted Love. When we give up ignorance and wrong identification, we untwist our manifestation of Love and let go of hate.

So the answer is to turn in, disentangle from what we loathe and re-cognize who we really are. Again, remember that self-loathing and self-love are just twisted Love. Love is who and how we really are—but as long as we remain locked in our self-hate, we are incapable of Love. The self-loather cannot simply decide to love. The Lover loves. The self-loather has to sacrifice itself in order to have the Lover emerge from under the cloak of hate. The self-loather emerges from the Lover. The self-loather is the twisted and shrunken manifestation of the Lover.

The popular delusion that most perpetuates our self-loathing is the belief that we are the creators of our own Grace. We are encouraged to believe that we can free ourselves on our own. In Truth, everything comes from God, even our self-hate. When we experience that truth, we can see how self-hate can in fact help us in our journey back to the Self. Embedded in self-hate is Grace. Grace makes us unsatisfied with our prison; it reveals to us that who we hate is not who we are. Self-hate helps us to let go of what is not us. It helps us to detach, if we are strong enough to seek Love. Then we surrender to God, Love and Guru. We no longer fight against our true nature.

We cannot get rid of our self-hate if we refuse to accept that we have it. Until we accept our self-hate, we will resort to a range of strategies to conceal it from ourselves and others.

We have two choices: either turn outward to avoid the Truth using these strategies of concealment, or turn in and face the Truth of our ignorance and wrong identification, and free ourselves by returning to Love.

In order to hate we have to maintain the small self. In order to maintain the small self we have to hate. The only way to Love is to surrender our cherished autonomy and accept Grace. Then we can be liberated from the prisons we have made for ourselves.