Question: You once said that our entire life unfolds between love and hatred. But how are these two feelings connected?

Answer: If there were no hatred, there would not be love either. If I did not desire something and feel fulfilled by it, then how could I feel that I love it?

The measure, quality, and depth of love always depend on the measure, quality, and depth of hatred.

Hatred is when I either reject something and want to push it away from me, or I suffer deeply because I do not have it. Within this spectrum lies the whole range of our relationships. In truth, everything in life is divided only into what I hate and what I love.

We are created from the desire to enjoy. Therefore, there are things that I hate and want to distance myself from since they negatively affect my desire to enjoy and there are things that I love and want to draw closer to because they positively affect my desire for pleasure. My entire life is woven between these two poles, between what is good for me, and what is bad for me, between hatred of what feels bad and the love for what feels good.

Yet perhaps we should re-educate ourselves to reconsider what is good and what is bad, what is worthy of enjoyment and what is not. Education, in this sense, means reshaping our attitude toward what appears attractive and pleasant, and toward what appears unpleasant or harmful.

This shift allows us to move beyond the simple question of what to love or what to hate, and instead to ask: what is true and what is false? After all, some things that I love turn out to be deceptive and damaging, while some things that I instinctively reject are true, and ultimately beneficial. I should pay attention to them, draw closer to them, and I will discover that they genuinely lead me to goodness.

In other words, I should not live according to my instinctive or culturally-acquired sense of good and evil—what I love and what I hate—but add a rational inquiry to it: What is truly good and what is truly bad? Not from the perspective of what feels pleasant or unpleasant, but from the higher perspective of what is worth experiencing as good or bad. Thus, I will no longer define good and evil by my personal tastes or by natural attraction or repulsion, but by absolute good and absolute evil—above my instincts.

This is possible because the human being is a social creature. We can determine what is good or bad not only by our personal sensations, but also by the influence of the environment. After all, we need those around us: they can respect us or, on the contrary, shame us. Because we are subject to the influence of the environment, we can completely change our values by learning to hate what we once loved.

Take, for example, a person who once behaved carelessly, as he pleased. Then, under the influence of his surroundings, he suddenly realizes that others do not respect him, even scorn him, for his sloppiness or poor manners.

He feels he has no choice but to change, to correct himself because society’s influence is powerful and felt sharply as either positive or negative. He begins to see his neglect of others as harmful to himself, and so he puts effort into correcting his behavior and attitude. In doing so, he reshapes his values.

This is how we can transform what we love and what we hate.
[180094]
From KabTV’s New Life 692 – What Is Love? 2/16/16

Related Material:
What Is Love after All?
Love Without Conditions
Love Always Rises Above Hate

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