"There is nothing more evil than hate. Long years of good work can go to waste because of a single spasm of hate. You may have spent a long time cultivating a relationship, and one day you become confused and perceive that friend as an enemy to your happiness. You explode in anger, lose control, and hurt your friend verbally or physically. We hear about this every day in circumstances ranging from domestic violence to all-out war.
"The great mass killings of this century — the murder of the Armenians; the slaughter in the trenches of World War 1 and II; the forced starvations in Africa; the Holocaust of the European Jews; the Japanese extermination the Manchurians and Chinese; the Tibetan, Cambodian, and Rwandan genocides; the imprisonments and executions of Native Americans and African Americans — all these horrors have had hate as their root and persistent cause. If there is a nuclear holocaust that ends all life on this planet, it will not be caused by nuclear technology or by political, religious, or economic disagreements. It will be caused by hate, The energy moving the hand that signs the orders to build missiles is that of hate. And in the final moment, the force that moves the finger to press the button to launch those missiles is none other than hate. Hate can now destroy all life on earth.
"In the karmic evolutionary sense, the positive imprints of virtuous actions, the seeds of future insight and freedom planted by the work of learning, reflection and contemplation, all the positive developmental energy we accumulate in a lifetime of effort can be destroyed by hate. It is said that hate can create an instant hell, a nightmare of death, and a horrific wakening . . ."
"Once we are prone to hate and rage, we project around us a field of paranoia and all people become our potential enemies. We feel destructive toward them, and we assume they feel destructive toward us. When we become cool, we don't project enmity onto others; we can observe them more objectively, and if they are in fact out to cause trouble, we can quickly act to avoid it. The key insight is that hate itself is our worst enemy. It is not our energy, our instrument or our tool. It deceives us into thinking we are it, and then we become its tool. In order to gain our freedom and happiness, to secure the happiness of those we care about, and to secure ourselves against aggression, we have to see through the masquerade of hate, see it as our real enemy, and begin a methodical campaign to conquer it."
