Hate Is A Personal Journey
My parents are ardent supporters of a political party whose ideology is different from what I and my siblings stand for. So at times a discussion on political scenario in the family gatherings generates heated exchanges. During one such discussion my mother declared that she hates Muslims. It gave me a punch for thought. I stopped for a moment and then asked my 72 year old mother, “Have you been harmed by any Muslim in your life Ma?”
And it was her turn for a pause. She finally said, “No”.
But her antipathy towards Muslims decides her political perception and may be some other life aspects.
And ‘a realization’ knocked me like a bolt. She has not been harmed nor done any good to her by any Muslim. She in fact has interacted with only one Muslim family in her entire life. And I know that interaction was always cordial till it lasted. They were neighbor to her brother’s family. When her brother’s family shifted out to some other place this interaction ceased. Where from her hate stems then? Her hate has nothing to do with Physical Muslims; it has everything to do with mental construct about Muslims, which might be tormenting her in her perception some ways. Her journey of hate has no correlation with her personal physical experience. Similarly I have no personal experience of harm from any party worker of the political party I oppose, which had led to those heated exchanges between me and my parents.
I meditated through my life and found there was time I was a Muslim Hater. When I was in school and after a lost cricket match when I used to hear from somebody that Muslims in Nalla Road were celebrating the victory of Pakistan, my sense of loss due to defeat of the cricket team used to turn into rage against the Muslims. With my eyes closed and attention on my entire body, I could witness the entire scene in my mind and watch the energy flow in my body. The rush of energy into solar plexus and constriction at the chest and huge energy rush to the top of my head, all came up to my conscious from deep labyrinths of my memory and re-experiencing the entire process of energy flow of emotions from defeat to rage and keeping the body calm was a real task. At some moment I lost equanimity and to let out that energy I had to shout at the top of my voice. I did that and watched that. Over an hour of meditation the energy and emotions drained out of my system and the memory did not have that charge.
I looked back and found for my journey of hate there was actually no OTHER. I and I only in my mind and body felt all those emotions then through MY PERCEPTIONS of OTHER sitting in my drawing room alone. No PHYSICAL OTHER came to take me through that journey PHYSICALLY. IT was ME who CREATED that journey for me and went through it. But I attributed my victim hood to Cricket team and Muslims.
Many more sittings of meditation and I discovered many more layers of victim-hood where the OTHER in my identification is the word Muslim: The 9/11, the ISIS, the Mumbai terror attack, the Kashmiri Pundit exodus. The more I looked inwards I found a pattern in my journey. Each journey of hate and rage has been taken by me sitting in somewhere safe and comfortable. Nothing personal or physical has happened to me from the OTHER. But each time the harm to me was intensely personal and acutely physical because I perceived ‘an I’ and identified with ‘an I’ against ‘an OTHER’. Each sitting of meditation was extremely taxing in terms of physical discomfort and it was fascinating to see the rush of energy in the body before it gradually waned like an external storm, which builds of gradually, reaches a devastating peak and then wanes to give way to a sense of calm.
But this diving into the journey of hate took me beyond the word Muslim. It took me to the words Perpetrator and perpetrated and the generic pattern of I as perpetrated and OTHER as perpetrator. The other and perpetrators have been taking different words, in fact almost unlimited range of words…parents, teachers, classmates, siblings, neighbors from childhood to boss, coworkers, in-laws, clients, men in adulthood just to give a sample. The list is actually too large and too dynamic to put in a static, all encompassing list.
The OTHER is enormous and amorphous also. And point to point my identification of I comes from this OTHER only. At one point I am I with one OTHER and later another layer brings my identification with another OTHER. So in this journey the OTHER is not static because my identification is dynamic.
But the process is repetitiously static. The journey begins with my identification with an erstwhile OTHER as I and taking an emotion of perpetrated against some OTHER and then the sense of loss, the sense of existential fear, the emotion of hatred and rage, then the sense of strong energy depression bringing dysfunction to the physical system, more energy constriction and energy burst from solar plexus to heart to crown.
Have I been liberated? J
Sadly… no. As I said, my stock of ‘I’ identification to be perpetrated is vast so my hate journey also comes to surface in different forms. But then through this meditation journey I also get to see my ‘I’ identification to be with the emotion of perpetrator also and the euphoria of self righteousness and blood rush. ..
But this awareness blunts out some of the high tide in me and brings calm and balance much swifter than earlier.
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