Another View 2-1

It is an interesting concept, and the very harshness of the language flips the switch “off,” as it feels like an indictment of our very human condition. The concept I refer to centers around the anthropological continuum of the true nature of the human being. Our sacred tradition does, in fact, present the reality that the existence of every reasonable created being oscillates between two poles: the one, love towards God to the point of self-hatred; the other, love of self to hatred of God. What to do with this kind of extremism, becomes the issue of the heart. Where is the balance?

My experience confirms that these two poles of attraction cannot be escaped, no matter how we attempt to ameliorate the juxtaposition of the argument. The responsibility is difficult to bear: everything that happens in our personal life is -- in reality -- our spiritual self-determination, whether we are aware of it or not, own it or not. This spiritual self-determination springs from the irrational depths of our unconscious, where our rational thinking also starts. In defining both, the same words are used -- love and hate, only in a different sequence, a different connection.

The difference, however, is not only in the sequence -- but also in the profound meaning of the words. In the first instance (love towards God to the point of self-hatred) it is a case of holy and total love, holy and total hatred. The second (love of self to hatred of God) refers to narcissistic self-love and is birthed from some sense of lack, a kind of self-hatred. The first type of hatred -- self-hatred -- springs from the fullness of our love for God, from the total concentration of all the forces of our being in God, to the point of forgetfulness of self, of reluctance to consider oneself.

This is the “harsh” language of the desert tradition of Christianity. So, what if we re-image this word. Is it really “self-hatred” that is the resultant container when one “totally loves God.” There is a kind of ultimate alienation when we turn our love toward God, and God alone. There is a kind of “radical emptiness,” to use the phrase of Ken Wilber, that abandons the self to a self-longing for holiness. This is, in actuality, the progression of, or the evolution of, our own consciousness. And this, most often, results in spiritual bankruptcy that occurs each and every time we turn to ourselves as some Ultimate source, finding the disappointment to be such that our aberration is the deficient ego claiming a fullness that can never be realized in isolation, for it is simply another kind of idolatry.

So -- if we have been given everything we need already, and are “created in the image and likeness of God“, then why all this language of “self-hatred.” Again, to re-image the concept: our spiritual forbearers were right. “God became human in order that humans might become deified (Athanasius, Gregory Nazianzen, etc.) What if the shape of our alienation is such that it is only when we face into our idolatry of pretending to be the I Am, rather than knowing I Am is participatory. Therefore all my attempts to become the I Am are more often than not -- not participatory, and therefore not self-emptying. Rather, this I Am attempts to create boundaries that claim too much of a separate-self sense, and is therefore conceived in fear. We create this separate-self sense out of some kind of terror of “inadequacy,” rather than from that which is the security of “image and likeness.” That we are born of Wholeness is not in question. Our nature of origin is Spirit. In forgetfulness, we turn from this Wholeness, this Spirit of Original Self -- separating ourselves into an alienation that simply must be in order to understand what was and is our true origin.

“Self-hatred” becomes the harsh term of alienation from self. We don’t like the term because we feel judged, somehow. And we are, in fact, in some way “judged.” The other truth of this may be that each of us knows how to hate ourselves so very well that we need a God who will turn us towards the divine, and not away from the only Source from which we are the inheritors of a larger sense of our true worth and identity. So -- “self-hatred” would never be God’s injunction, rather, simply the reality we experience when we turn towards something less than our own fulfillment. It is, in fact, the “warning signal” that we are turning from our intended purpose, that we are entering the wasteland of a self-created desolation that can lead no where else but to a sense of self-hatred. And, perhaps, this is the only response to “turn us back” -- back to our true home, our truest sense of self, our becoming deified -- God’s only-ever desire for us.

It is always God, so it seems, who has for us and for our lives, Another View.