Although a devotion to Christianity is often required in modern-day American politics, one of its central teachings, to love your enemy, is overlooked. Former President Bill Clinton has commented on the virulence of the political atmosphere that seemed to drastically increase during his time in office. Instead of winning against your opponent, he observed, the new attitude was that the other side needed to be destroyed. As a result, the sense of being colleagues or of reaching across the aisle was lost -- and remains lost. The other party is nothing less than the enemy.
The difficult question of how to love your enemy goes much deeper than this. Many teachings in the New Testament clash with psychological reality. To love someone who hates you, like turning the other cheek when someone hits you, seems like a spiritual ideal that can't be attained except by saints. Who among us is a saint?
We could turn the issue around, however. Saintliness becomes realistic by seeing it as a state of higher consciousness. Christ was talking about personal transformation. That much seems to be beyond doubt. "Higher consciousness" isn't a religious term, however, even if Christ does point to the kingdom of heaven being within. My purpose isn't to argue that personal transformation is specifically Christian. But it is the key to loving your enemy.
An analysis of the problem would go something like the following:
1. Anger is a natural emotion, but when it turns to hatred, a natural emotion becomes distorted. Anger is bottled up and feeds on itself. Ideas of revenge, retribution and violence build up over time. People who have injured, opposed or offended you start to turn into enemies.
2. The rationale for hating an enemy can become quite complex and convincing. Long-held grudges always tell a story in which the wronged party is in the right. But behind these rationales the fuel is bottled-up anger.
3. Even when someone commits a horrendous offense against you, which would seem to justify seeking revenge, you are doing harm to yourself by harboring built-up anger. This insight, which is hard for many people -- and nations -- to arrive at, is key.
4. Once you see that the problem is built-up anger, and that anger is irrational and destructive, there is an incentive to release it. An emotional debt to the past creates suffering in the present. In cases where horrible crimes have been committed, the higher goal is to seek justice, not revenge. The two aren't the same thing.
5. Paying old emotional debts can be done in various ways. A person can begin to cross the divide, talking to his enemy and realizing that both share a common psychology. Empathy can be cultivated. Letting go of pride and ego is worth pursuing. Yet much of this letting go happens only at the mental level, which isn't adequate to the hot, violent feelings being held inside. In fact, when anger management training brings up old hostility without giving a way to release it, attempts at controlling anger fail miserably.
6. Releasing the hot, violent energy of anger can be done. Under the rubric of "energy work," there are now many practitioners in this area. If that seems too arcane, it needn't. Sit down and revisit a memory that arouses your anger. Generally these are memories where you feel that an injustice has been committed against you. Your mind is filled with reasons for how you were wronged. Now pause and feel the actual energy of your anger. Your body may be tense, your skin warm, breathing ragged, heartbeat increased. The physical side of anger is the key to releasing it, because rationales go on forever. They are all-consuming and self-consuming at the same time.
7. Once you have contacted the physical side of anger, there is a pivotal moment. If you express your anger by acting it out, mentally or physically, none of the energy will be released. Feeling your anger and expressing it still holds the energy inside. You must want the anger to go, which can be tricky. Like every strong emotion, anger believes in itself; it wants to stick around and keep telling you its story. To get past this allure, stop paying attention to the story and the rationales attached to it. Instead, focus on making the angry enrgy leave. This may require an experienced guide, because the pivotal moment is psychologically slippery.
Slippery or not, people have gotten past anger, first addressing their personal grievances, then moving on to attack the whole issue of anger at its root. The root cause of destructive rage is holding on to the past. Why do we do that? Anger gives a secret sense of power; it leads to overblown fantasies of violence and revenge. As long as these seductive elements appeal to you, there is no hope of loving your enemy. At best you will reach a simmering truce. The reality is that Christ's teaching cannot be fulfilled in an ordinary psychological state. Rising above the level of the problem is the only way to find the level of the solution. This is practical spirituality, and if you explore its methods, they work.
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I teach my couples that anger wasn’t the first feeling you. You probably felt hurt, or scared, or sad. I call those the “soft” feelings.
The soft feelings are the ones generated by our Universal Human Needs, for things like: Respect, Caring, Cooperation and Understanding. Others don’t cause our feelings; our needs do, via the sensations which Depak describes. That’s why returning to the sensate level is so useful.
Instead, if we THINK about what happened, and then tell ourselves a story: “I didn’t deserve that!” and it’s the reaction to our own thinking which generates the “secondary” feeling of anger.
The first step in compassion is having compassion for yourself. The fork in the road between enemy thinking and love is deciding whether to love yourself or hate the other person. You can focus on the other person, and your need will never get met. Or focus on yourself since it’s YOUR need that generated the sensations.
The self-compassionate path follows the sensations back to the need. Once we know what we need, we automatically become resourced to get that need met. Once we experience self-compassion, it doesn’t require sainthood to extend that compassion to the other. After all, they are the same as us – need-motivated and doing the best they can.
For more about approach: http://sameoldargument.blogspot.com/
Ben had a way of cutting to the nonsense....
None but ourselves can free our minds
Have no fear for atomic energy
'Cause none of them can stop the time.
~bob marley
For me it's not someone who disagrees with you, but someone or something working toward your demise or with goals to harm you.
And in that definition, they haven't earned my love, so none will be given, doesn't mean I hate my enemy, but in no way will I love someone who wishes or is working toward harming me.
Namaste! Becca Chopra, author of The Chakra Diaries
http://www.thechakras.org
1.Enemies are your best teachers, usually a projection of your own weaknesses.
2.Enemies need to know you will not go away and not back down.
3. If you do back down or go away, you give your power away by letting them (indirectly) control your actions.
4. Having the enemy present teaches us to learn from adversity consistently.
The tea party is one artefact of the history of continuous re-balancing that derives from the democratic attributes of the nation such as freedom of speech and assembly. After testing the extremes, thanks to the Bush years, the nation is now ready to return to a path of moderation. The tea party promptly rushed out to the front of the parade but alas, it missed the turn.
great article.
"Strange how Darwin's "Survival of the fittest" keeps popping up in the most unlikely places".
capitalism by its very nature and agenda is survival of the fittest and the fundamentalist christians love it. heck most americans love it while it takes most of them to third world status. even the unions love it while it eliminates them. the paradigm effect is that powerful.
“Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty which are embodied in one maxim: the fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate” Bertrand Russell.
With communism man exploits man, with capitalism it is the other way around.
Capitalism gives us a twofer. Man exploits man and the capitalist’s exploits government.
Researcher :-)
Progression from being Homo sapiens at the apex of evolution – the naked apes – to becoming saints: F. Being greedy and selfish at the expense of others and thus a failure as a human being; D. Not doing to others what you do not want done unto you; C. Wanting for others what you want for yourself; B. Loving others as you love yourself; A. Being saintly by loving others more than you love yourself.
A saint is anyone who as an act of compassion and mercy gives of its resources to others when needed without expecting anything in return and is willing to even sacrifice its own life knowingly and conscientiously in order to make this a better world for the whole of humanity. In this respect on any given day one may touch upon any/or all these categories one the basis of one’s word and/or deeds. It is thus the cumulative grade-point-average that exemplifies where one belongs in the progression from being an ape to becoming a saint.
interesting approach to the evolution of consciousness process.
one cannot love others more than they love their self.
when we learn to love self then we are able to love self. not the ego self but the divine self. all have the potential of saints.
this is the unfolding process from limited awareness to divine potential and realization of that divine potential.
When one is willing to give one's life for a higher cause that is loving others more than the self.