Love and hate are emotions. Love is a positive emotion and hate is a negative one. They are opposites, like two sides of a coin. We learn both in life. Love and hate are extremes but there are other emotions in between.

Hate is caused by fear, but what causes fear itself? We fear things we don’t know, don’t understand or don’t feel, and that means we fear things we have no knowledge of. Ultimately, hate is caused by a lack of knowledge.

To free ourselves from hate and fear we have to learn about the things we hate. Bring to mind something that you hated but began to like as soon as you learned more about it. The process is always the same. As you learn more, you slowly begin to change. Hate subsides and you go through other negative emotions like disliking, unaccepting and disagreeing. Those emotions are not as strong as hate. If you continue the process of learning, you will eventually get to the point of accepting or even liking something that previously caused your hate. In some cases you may even grow to love it. Yes, that was the case of tomato soup that I hated as a child and now it is one of my favorites.

This shows a process of going from negative emotions to positive ones. Sometimes in life we might experience the opposite process when we love something but in due course, as we discover the truth, we begin to hate it. That is also a learning process. When we reach the hate stage, we have to continue to learn, perhaps by looking at the thing or the matter from another angle. Always realize that that which you hate has a right to exist.

Emotions are good since they signal where we are in the process of learning. In short, hate means we know nothing, love means we know a lot but that is still not the end of learning. Yes, it is not the end. In fact, when you know everything about a particular thing or matter, you become free from emotions and they are no longer needed. They have already helped you to reach a full understanding.