If someone wants to hate, they have every right to. Why would you want to stop them?

It seems a popular reaction to just say, they should stop hating, because hating is wrong and if they hate they are guilty.

But they do have free will and if they want to hate that is their freedom to do so.

The bigger question is, does that hate actually have any power to cause someone to be changed against their will.

And this is where we get into who is responsible for causation, who has the power, and who owns the effects.

The secret of salvation would say you can ONLY ever do anything to yourself. So it is possible that someone else's hate can actually do anything to you? Not if you don't USE it to do so.

So then it becomes a matter of, not stopping other people from hating, but becoming immune to their hate.

Ultimately then you're supposed to become invulnerable and immortal, no longer shifting blame and responsibility for your happiness onto others, or expecting them to treat you a certain way.

If you are being responsible for everything you feel and experience, then someone else trying to hate is not a cause of you, and cannot cause you to be hurt.

So then, should they stop hating? Should they stop because you want them to choose for you, because you want them to give you what you want, and because you are manipulating them?

You should let them carry on hating, and instead of teaching that you are vulnerable and weak and easily at the effect of the world, you should teach that you are invulnerable and nothing in the world can affect you.

As the course says, show your brother that you had no hurt of him. It doesn't matter what anyone does even if it seems vicious, it can have no effect on you unless you fail to recognise this is your dream.

And the secret of salvation tells you that no-thing affects you but yourself. You can be attacked by nothing but your own thoughts. Only the self-accused condemn.

So instead of seeing it as hate, with a power capable of actually hurting you, you need to change how you see it and recognize that is it really the other person hating themselves.

It doesn't have anything to do with you. Their attempted attack is self-attack. They are trying to make you responsible for their happiness and wellbeing. They want you to change in order for them to feel better.

That is sickness, just as it would be sickness to react to them in the same way, by wanting them to change in order to make you feel better.

What you really want to be doing is realising that hate cannot apply to you because you are innocent and holy, and therefore their accusation of hate must be incorrect, and something to laugh at.

Then you are strong and not weak, you are certain and not vulnerable. And the attempts by others to hate you has no effect.

You can then recognize that their hate is simply them hating themselves and trying to destroy themselves, while trying to get you to decide for them whether they are loveable or not.

So decide for them that they are loveable and it will dissolve the impact of the hate and make them look at themselves.

The solution to being hated isn't to try to control the haters or to stop them hating or make them wrong for doing so. It's to realize that they are mistaken and what they claim is not true.

Only that can be sanity, not reacting on the basis of believing there is truth to what they say, or by positioning yourself as a victim. Hate is just an attempt to disown and project guilt, having attacked ourselves and hated ourselves first. That's what needs healing, not the projections.

If you react to hate and try to stop and control it, you are also being hateful. You hate hate. That's no better. You have to love hate if you want to be unaffected by it.

Let them hate. Know that it is not the truth of you.

"Hear not the call of hate, and see no fantasies. For your completion lies in truth, and NOWHERE ELSE. See in the call of hate, and in every fantasy that rises to delay you, but the call for help, that rises ceaselessly from you to your Creator."

You really have only this choice.

A) Love

B) Hate

Just as Jesus says that what is not love is murder, and that even the slightest grievance is murderous, so too it is true that if you are not being FULLY loving you are not really being loving (at all) and therefore are in a state of HATE.

Now, it does not seem to most people that they are being hateful when they are not Loving. This is because so much of the hate has been made unconscious.

Sin has been denied with guilt, guilt has been denied with fear, and a veneer of fake innocence has been drawn over the mind. This innocence, seemingly all that is left in conscious awareness, creates the ILLUSION of unawareness that you are "being hateful" at all.

The result is that you feel relatively neutral, seemingly not enraged, seemingly quite calm most of the time, and seeming not to be actively hating. But this is because you are lost inside of layers of denial and unconsciousness. It renders your current perspective as though you are not intending to sin at all, and are relatively mild and weak.

But we have to at some point more honest about this. Jesus says love cannot be fully understood until the love is WHOLE, and without that wholeness it is not really love. It seems we can have degrees of love but that also means degrees of hate. He says we simply do not RECOGNIZE just how much we hate our brothers. Similarly, when we’re just casually coasting through life on unconscious autopilot, we do not recognize that we’re spending almost all our time in some form of hate. If it’s not total love, it is hate.

This is quite sobering and if we can own up to this without guilt, we’ll be able to use this information to recognize that whenever we are not being totally loving, we MUST be hating. We are not merely in some neutralized state. It is love or hate, those are the only choices. There is no escaping this. So that means, if I am not fully loving right now, I must be in SOME way hating.

Equipped with that information it now becomes easier to RECOGNIZE that, if I’m not being loving, I’m hating in some way, and so this helps me to be motivated or attentive to the "need" to return to being more loving. It identifies that what I thought was neutral or ok is in fact negative and hurtful in some fashion.

We’ve become far too used to letting moderate hatred slide by without correction. Or as Jesus says, too tolerant of mind wandering (away from our love self). Recognizing that I am actively "hating" and realizing that I’m really not being fully loving towards people, brings AWARENESS, and that’s a good starting point for wanting to change my mind.

If you think that they are causing your problems, and that they need to change, you're mistaken. If you could get them to change, your problem won't really go away.

Because you are the one who is attacking you.

You just think it's someone else's fault, but really your blame is just your attempt to get rid of your own self-blame. You attacked yourself, and now you are trying to find someone else guilty for it.

If you were to get someone else to behave differently or treat you differently, it still wouldn't undo your suffering. It might remove from your experience, temporarily, the current projection of your self-attack, but as soon as someone else comes along that fits the bill, you'll do it all over again.

You do not have a problem with other people. You have a problem with yourself. You can't fix this problem by trying to force someone else to be responsible for it, or to get them to fix it for you.

You have to recognize that you're doing this to yourself, and you were all along. Then undo that. Stop hating yourself, and your need to blame will disappear. Stop hating yourself, and your need to find other people guilty will disappear.

Your finding other people guilty is not really the problem, and your hating other people is not really the problem, and your blaming of people is not really the problem. But your problem is that you do these things in order to deny what YOU believe is true about yourself. These attacks are just cover-ups for your own self-attack. They are indirect self-abuse.

You don't even particularly need to be concerned about trying to become more loving towards others. Love will reveal itself naturally when you remove your own blocks to it. Your own blocks are your belief that you're sinful. It's your self-condemnation and judgement of yourself. You but accuse others of your own sinfulness.

Once you remove your own crap and clean up your own attitude about yourself, automatically you will see this renewed self in other people, because you won't be putting tons of guilt into them. You'll see them for how they really are because you're seeing yourself for how you really are.

As within, so without. You are the one who needs forgiveness.

Everyone is free. Everyone is entirely given total permission to be free by God. That means that even if you choose to deny God, you are free to do so. Even if you want to try to be evil, you are free to do so. Even if you want to hate and attack and murder and destroy, you are technically free to do so.

That doesn't mean that there won't be consequences that happen as a result of what you choose, however. If you hate you will be hating yourself, and cannot love yourself while you hate. If you attack and murder you are in effect attempting to kill yourself, and you will feel guilty and alone as a result, not to mention society's typical punishments.

But that doesn't meant you are not free if you so choose. God doesn't coerce. He does will your happiness and sanity but it's still up to you if you want to try to be insane and choose things which produce suffering. No i'm not condoning that anyone does anything harmful whatsoever, I'm just saying that you have the freedom.

If someone is being hateful and you start trying to resist their hate, you are actually trying to be affected by it. If you let them be hateful you will feel a sense of relief that you are not as affected by it. You are choosing whether or not you are affected by it. If you are not affected by it then you can feel at peace even as someone tries to hate, because it really is up to your own freedom as to what you experience.

It isn't therefore necessary to try to control or resist or stop people from being hateful or mean or vicious, because if you say that you need them to stop then you're also saying that your peace and happiness depend on their choice. And that means you're trying to deny your own freedom. And then you're trying to deny them their freedom, to imprison them, in order to control reality and try to make things be the way you want them.

You have no real right to control the free will of others, to imprison them for anything they think they do, to stop them or prevent them or resist them or attack them in the name of love. Everyone is always free, even what people call criminals or evil or abusers or enemies. This isn't necessarily a popular view but it's reality.

Jesus tells us in ACIM that we should let the people in the world be as vicious as they may, because the only way that we would be affected by that viciousness would by be forgetting that you had the freedom to dream the dream. If you are able to choose not to be affected, because you are free, and immortal, then obviously it's not really the responsibility of anyone else to "behave correctly" to try to make your world right.

You don't need, and shouldn't need, anyone else to change in order for you to be happy and at peace, otherwise your peace depends on them and now you are seeking outside yourself for salvation. Not to mention that you are shifting responsibility outside of yourself and placing the weight of guilt into the hands of others. Wanting the haters to stop hating is a form of scapegoating, and the projection of justified anger as guilt.

You don't need people to stop hating you, or to acknowledge you, or to recognize you, or to treat you well. You need to claim your immortality and invulnerability and stop using people to attack yourself. They have no power over you that you don't give away to them yourself. When you give no power to the illusion to cause you it has no effect on you. Only you can attack yourself, only you can make yourself suffer, and only you can really hate yourself. Let the world spin, let the haters hate, and let them have their madness. It's not yours.

"The secret of salvation is but this: That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF. No matter what the form of the attack, this STILL is true. Whoever takes the role of enemy and of attacker, STILL is this the truth. Whatever seems to be the cause of any pain and suffering you feel, this is STILL true. For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that YOU were dreaming. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they COULD have no effect on you, unless you failed to recognize it is YOUR dream. This single lesson learned will set you free from suffering, WHATEVER form it takes."

You can't believe that other people are guilty or bad or wrong or sinful without believing that it applies to you somehow.

You can't be someone who is separate from the effects of your own attack.

You can't judge someone, believing that your judgement of them is not a judgement of yourself.

To believe that someone else is very wrong and this does not include you, is insanity.

Try hating someone while at the same time experiencing full and complete love for yourself. Try it. You will fail.

Try being outraged and angry at someone while fully experiencing the joy and peace of your true self. Impossible.

Try blaming someone for being wrong or guilty or sinful or a criminal and simultaneously experience a sense of serenity and happiness and love within yourself. You will not be able to.

The fact is, your attack on them attacks YOU. You cannot believe in sin without being sinful. You cannot believe in guilt without being guilty. You cannot believe in fear without being afraid. You cannot believe in punishment without being punished. And you cannot believe in death without being dead.

To deny this is insane. What applies to you applies everywhere. It is the ego which claims something can apply to you which doesn't apply to someone else, or vice versa. You can't have two sets of rules that come into effect whenever it pleases you or makes you out to be better off. That's dishonest to say the least.

It is not possible to hold a thought of accusation in your own mind, which seems to be about someone else, without YOU also receiving side-effects from that thought. That thought is toxic.

A thought of attack, even if it's a justified attack, is still an attack. And attack thoughts have attacking properties. It's like a nasty, dark, spiky, painful energy in your mind. Do you think you get away with not being affected by that?

So here's the conundrum. You cannot have a negative thought about anyone else without it affecting you. You have to put the negative thought into your own interior mind-garden, and it's going to grow a bunch of weeds there. It's going to attack YOU as much as it attacks someone else.

It's all or nothing. Either the thought applies to you AND them, or it doesn't apply to either of you.

When you're in the business of having the kind of thoughts that apply 'separately' to separate people, those are INSANE thoughts.

If you would realize that your attack thoughts (about other people) are attacking your invulnerability, you would not have them.

If you would realize that you cannot hate someone without hating yourself, you would not hate.

If you would realize that you can't judge and condemn someone without you also feeling condemned, you would not do it.

There is no 'separate justice'. There is no person A being guilty and person B being innocent. Either all are innocent or all are guilty. The accused and the accuser are both guilty.

The ego's laws, the law of the land, are all based on this idea. Someone is to blame, and someone is not. This is not a law based in sanity.

God's law says that whatever is true of one, is true of all. Whatever applies to one, applies to all. One law that applies equally to everyone and finds everyone equally innocent. That is the only sane law.

"Father, I come to You through Him Who is Your Son and my true Self as well. Amen."

"To be alive and not to know yourself is to believe that you are really dead. For what is life except to be yourself, and what but you can be alive instead?"

"The sudden EXPANSION of the self that takes place with your DESIRE for it, is the irresistible appeal the holy instant holds. It calls to you to be yourself, within its safe embrace."

It's really just a matter of, are you really being your true self, or are you pretending to be something you're not?

If you're pretending, you're people-pleasing. That means you're putting on a persona. The persona is a fake mask, sometimes the "face of innocence", which tries to show people what you want them to see, or what you think will manipulate them into giving you the love and attention and validation that you yearn for as a result of hating your real self.

But even though the pleasing of others might please them, and maybe elicit some of the positive responses that you think you need, it's not really you that gets validated. It's the fake mask of a self that you put over the top of you. People like your little fake self but you only hold it up because you think people will hate and judge and reject the real you.

The truth though is that you yourself are hating and judging and rejecting the real you, by putting on this false image of yourself. While you try to be what you think other people want, and what will make them want you, you simultaneously hide and bury who you actually are.

It also prevents anyone from really loving you for who you are. Which means that even if you can get people to adore your fake presentation, it's still not you that they adore. And you constantly have to bend over backwards, walk on eggshells, hide yourself, stuff your feelings and avoid being seen, just to get some scraps of external love.

Another aspect to this is that by being unwilling to look within and to let people know that you have "defiled yourself", you also become unable to recognize the limitations of others. This produces false grandiose expectations that other people will be perfect toward you, because your persona is only willing to acknowledge what appears to be "good and acceptable". By only wanting to admit to that in yourself, in denial of the darkness, you become unable to see the darkness of others.

This then leads to an inability to acknowledge that other people are unloving, will never love you due to their chosen limits, that they can't give you what you want, cannot appease or validate you, and that they don't really want you because of their own egos. This harsh seeming truth lies hidden behind attempts to only find appealing "surface" signals that look as if nothing is wrong. It's an illusion of peace and acceptable and love that blinds you and covers over the deeper truth that things are not okay in you OR in them, and that therefore they can't save you from your self attack.

Often this all starts in childhood, seemingly, when the parents are not totally unconditionally loving, coupled with the physically-induced belief that you as a baby depend on the whole world to look after you. It sets up a dependency and an expectation that you will get everything from your parents or from the world. And if the world is not forthcoming with total love and validation, you'll feel empty and lost and alone, which will then compel you to overcompensate by busting a gut to try to get some response out of it/them, but it's like sucking blood from a stone. The broken saviours can't rescue you from your self destruction.

The less you can get the love from the world the more desperate you become, trying to suck up to it, putting yourself beneath it as though you are worthless, acting like a slave, hating yourself, castrating yourself and whipping yourself, trying to diminish who you are in order to only be what you think other people want you to be. And all this is a form of bargaining, trying to create a deal in which if you will let other people use you for their own selfish needs and wants, then you might at least get a little bit of something in return. So then you become a willing doormat with low self-esteem. Punish me please, thank you.

When you are not willing to confess to being broken, exposing the darkness and allowing others to see that you are not perfect, it makes it impossible for you to recognize that other people are imperfect also. Imagining that your ego is perfect and the your persona is without flaw, you other people as artificially flawless, which ignores their limitations and sets up huge expectations for them to serve you. And then they can't, and then there's anger and disappointment.

Only when you become willing to look at the dark stuff and let the light shine on it, will that same light illuminate the darkness of others, revealing their calls for love and their limitations. And this will bring an end to the external dependency, desperation for love, and the unwillingness to be your real self. And yet, paradoxically, by confessing to your "secret sins and hidden hates", which are not true of you anyway, it shines a light on them and dispels them. This reveals the real you, which has no faults or problems or weaknesses to be solved or defended against.

All of these disguises and facades and dishonesties and ways of not being yourself have to be undone. It means being willing to be exposed. And that means being willing to let people see and be aware of the various ways that you think you're defective. Your flaws, your sicknesses, your limitations, your faults, your bad attitudes, your off-days, the fact that things are sucking right now and you don't want to keep hiding it. That also leads to a willingness to be seen to be broken in public, crying and emoting and being upset around people and letting them know that no, you're not doing okay today, you're having a shit time of it.

But this exposure begins to let the truth in, admits the truth, and sheds light on what's going on. And actually this means that you're starting to step out into the light and let God see you. It means you're stopping hiding, no longer willing to be a fake self, wanting to be true to yourself. And you'll find that in fact your real self is profoundly strong and powerful and capable of remaining centred and peaceful no matter what is happening outside, if you'll only stay true to it and not keep abandoning yourself.

The more you are willing to be seen and heard, faults and all, crappy days and all, depression and anxiety and sickness and terrible attitudes and all, the more you're letting the healing come in. It means you're dropping your defences and lowering your walls and learning to trust yourself. It takes some courage to stand up and be seen. To tell people that you're not doing well. To own up to anything that's going on with you instead of just putting on a smile and pretending life is all roses. But this ownership is exactly what you need to own your true self, your real life, and your whole mind. Your sanity and freedom depends on it.

To know yourself, to be yourself, to trust yourself, to love yourself, to let yourself exist and be seen, to find peace from not having to modify who you are constantly, having a single unconditional response of love to everything, and meeting your brothers on this firm footing of reality and truth is our ultimate goal. Because God exists in the light and if we want to go home to God we have to expose ourselves fully. And in that exposure we are completely protected and safe. It is only the darkness that haunts us. And light always dispels darkness.

"It is only in darkness and in ignorance that you perceive the frightening, and you shrink away from it to further darkness."

"The steady brilliance of this light remains, and leads you out of darkness, nor will you be able to forget the way again."

"Everyone here has entered darkness, yet no-one has entered it alone. Nor need he stay more than an instant. For he has come with Heaven's help within him, ready to lead him OUT of darkness into light at ANY time."

"Coming out of the dark. I finally see the light now. It's shining on me. I know that love can save me." - Gloria Estephan

It is not possible to be angry at another person and see the other person correctly.

If you are in any way experiencing the other person as anything other than PURE LOVE, there must be some kind of negative attitude in your own mind with which you are seeing them. This negative attitude acts as a BLOCK to awareness, a filter, which is skewing perception. It is showing you something that is not really IN the other person, but is in fact in your own mind. Its your judgement. Your hate.

While you are perceiving others through this filter of hate, it is impossible for you to see them correctly. So if you are not seeing them correctly, how are you able to completely objectively evaluate whether they deserve to be hated or not? You can't. Therefore your hate is always unjustified and in error, and for all you know, underneath a world that SEEMS like it is filled with hate, there could be a world filled with LOVE, that you just don't SEE because you are too busy hating it.

Again the ego has lied, to tell us that its possible to objectively perceive the world at the same time as evaluating that people are enemies or are unworthy or are to be hated or are guilty in some way. If we see this in them, we are NOT seeing them clearly, and we are not being shown a clear view of reality, and our evaluation is now in ERROR. We have become blind to what is actually there.

Only when you look with unconditional love can you have TRUE VISION and SEE what is really there. Otherwise, you are looking with the ego and you will not be able to see.

"I cannot see in darkness but in light" - ACIM

From a human perspective we might think of life as starting and birth and ending in death. This is typical ego self-interest of course.

The world itself is more of a cyclic, regurgitating, constant transformation and change, transitioning from birth to death and back to birth again.

There are things in this world which seem to be new, to be born, new babies, new leaves, new offspring, new mornings, etc. It's not all about endings.

There are foods which are technically dead foods, which are fed to babies. What do baby tigers eat other than the carcasses of dead animals?

The rotting corpses of humans become food for worms and bacterias and flies, which use it to manufacture newborn worms and bacterias and flies. And so death becomes life again.

Cells divide and produce what seems to be new life forms. And yet the very same division ensures their eventual breakdown and dysfunction. They are born in separation and end in separation.

Technically when a human body dies, the materials the body is made of do not vanish. They just change form and redistribute. If buried they become the soil from which flowers grow. The chemical compounds become fertiliser and the building blocks for new growths.

Even as the tree leaves die off, the leaves settle to the ground and rot, but thus turn into rich soil, which in turn becomes the fertile ground for the emergence of new trees.

Around and around it goes, cycling from starts to endings and back to starts again. Birth and death are just two sides of the same coin. We seem to prefer one over the other, celebrating births and hating deaths, but they're really part of the same system.

As science would say, nothing here can really be destroyed, it can only change form. It's all energy, moving around and turning into one thing then another. This is the world's way. It's not really just a world of what we'd call death, it's also a world of what we'd call life. Life from corpses.

"It holds an image of the Son of God in which he is "laid to rest" in devastation's arms, where worms await to greet him and to last a little while by his destruction."

Illusions back and forth, sometimes it seems alive, sometimes dead. A world of opposites. A world of contrasts. A world of changes. Where even death is not a final end, because the materials of the dead become the materials of the living.

The whole system is one of every possible form of change, every appearance, every shift and change and transformation. Every way possible that there is no permanence and no absolutes. Not even physical death is absolute. It's all relativity.

A birth is just as much an illusion as a death. A newborn flower is just as much dead as a wilted one. And so the world mixes life and death together without really differentiating them, and thus producing confusion. It's only us humans who keep segmenting it out and labelling some parts as one thing or another.

"This is regarded as "the way of nature," not to be raised to question, but to be accepted as the "natural" law of life. The cyclical, the changing and unsure; the undependable and the unsteady, waxing and waning in a certain way upon a certain path"

Yes ultimately all physical things lead to what we call death, but so too are the new things just as much a part of dreaming. Sunrises and sunsets. Births and deaths. A phoenix rising from the ashes. Ashes becoming bodies again. It's all a big soup of uncertainty and untruth.

"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In ANY state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is NOT life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning."

"The first chaotic law is that the truth is different for everyone. 2 Like all these principles, this one maintains that each is separate and has a different set of thoughts that set him off from others. 3 This principle evolves from the belief there is a hierarchy of illusions; some are more valuable and therefore true. "

Basically the first law means that because you believe there is the absence of love/God within you, there are blocks to awareness, thus divisions, thus levels and hierarchies, and now everyone is separate and in competition. If love is not in you, you now have to find it outside of you.

"The second law of chaos, dear indeed to every worshipper of sin, is that each one must sin, and therefore deserves attack and death."

Since we're all separate and no-one apparently has love in them since it's been denied, we must all be sinners and therefore we all deserve attack and death. Another way to put this is that we now see "someone else" as having denied the love in us, its their fault, so we are justified in attacking them to get it back (even though we did this to ourselves).

"This leads directly to the third preposterous belief that seems to make chaos eternal. 6 For if God cannot be mistaken, He must accept His Son's belief in what he is, and hate him for it."

We then believe that God cannot be the source of love and therefore if God is not a source of love He must be evil and therefore is justified in hating us and wants us to be dead. So our own rejection of His love, creating the illusion of His absence, has rendered Him seemingly like an enemy, and we cannot "go there" to get love or salvation, so we have to find it elsewhere.

"The ego values only what it takes. 2 This leads to the fourth law of chaos, which, if the others are accepted, must be true. 3 This seeming law is the belief you have what you have taken. 4 By this, another's loss becomes your gain, and thus it fails to recognize that you can never take away save from yourself."

We now perceive that we must take from others in order to "get" what we are in need of, and that be taking from them, you can have it. This is a reversal of the fact that in order to have anything real you have to give it/extend it from God. The ego says you can "gain" or increase by accumulating from others against their will, so since all love is now considered "finite and limited" there is only so much to go around, taking it from others must cause them to have less, and so now you can gain by having more.

"But what is it you want that needs his death? 2 Can you be sure your murderous attack is justified unless you know what it is for? 3 And here a final principle of chaos comes to the "rescue." 4 It holds there is a substitute for love. 5 This is the magic that will cure all of your pain; the missing factor in your madness that makes it "sane."

In the fifth and final principle, basically we believe that this substitute for love - specialness - can be taken from others by force, causing in the most extreme cases for them to be drained of it thus murdered, and so their death has given you life, for which you are justified due to their sinfulness. We presume that this magical specialness will cure all of our pain and lack and needs and is what we are "lacking" and thus it will bring us salvation, make us sane, and take away all the emptiness. Except, it does not work.

The only solution to the emptiness is to return to awareness of love's presence within, by undoing all stages of separation and denial and becoming aware again that the truth is true - that we are already love, did not separate, have not lacked, and therefore need do nothing to be the love that we already are.