Welcome to the Buddhist Boot Camp Podcast. Our intention is to awaken, enlighten, enrich, and inspire a simple and uncomplicated life. Discover the benefits of mindful living with your host, Timber Hawkeye. In case you don't get my monthly emails, this episode is my July blog entry, with an invitation to join me for a Live Q&A on Buddhist Boot Camp's Facebook page to further discuss this topic of better understanding hatred on July seventh.
If you miss the live video feed, don't worry I will likely record another podcast episode with the discussion highlights. If I was to ask you to list five red items as quickly as possible, you would likely say roses, tomatoes, maybe fire trucks and stop signs, maybe even Rudolph's nose. And that's because we compulsively file everything we see and experience into groups categories, and types. Ever since infancy, we have rapidly developed an advanced
mental filing system to make the world less overwhelming. We notice something, we cross-reference it with everything that is already familiar to us, and quickly label it as either harmless or dangerous, cute or scary, and so on. But where do those labels come from? One problem is that we label everything unconsciously and automatically as individuals, hence my constant advocacy for mindfulness, and the second problem is that we do it collectively as a culture.
We use preassigned labels for whatever we don't understand by looking for society's pre-existing categories as a guide. These values may have been set by our parents, our close circle of friends, or worse yet, the Internet. Many of our thoughts, opinions, and beliefs, it turns out, are founded on information we subconsciously receive from sources as unreliable as the grapevine.
As Ethan Hawke recently pointed out, "The people with the most money have the biggest "megaphones, but it doesn't mean they have the most interesting things to say." We see this when a celebrity recommends something, for example, and it immediately becomes an overnight success. There's nothing inherently wrong with having leaders like that, but there's a difference between leaders who tell you
WHAT to think, and those who invite you to think for yourself. We apparently love it when other people do the thinking for us, yet, we insist on referring to ourselves as independently thinking individuals. As children and teenagers, many of us attached ourselves to popular beliefs in order to be, well, popular. But as adults, I think it's our inherent responsibility to question those beliefs.
If we never step outside of our small circle of friends and family, we end up living in an echo box, agreeing with everyone who agrees with us, and unfriending or disowning anyone who does not. Categorizing may sound harmless, effective, and even necessary, and it can certainly be at times, but not if we don't know the source of our information. Investigating the origin of external stimuli like the news is something
I think we're all doing a little more these days. But it's equally imperative to also question who is behind the source of our own opinions, because it could very well be the ego. And that's why I often remind myself not to believe everything I think. The ego can be dangerous because it is selfish enough to justify hatred and violence as a virtue. Driven by its strong lust for power, the ego considers the harm
it causes as somehow superior to the harm caused by others. without pausing to realize that causing harm only leads to more harm. This was glaringly obvious to me during a recent conversation with a so-called "peace activist," whom I found rather hostile. He insisted there is a big difference between a Neo-Nazi who wants him dead simply because he is black or gay, for example, and him wanting to kill that Neo-Nazi.
The thing is, even terrorists believe they are fundamentally good with a strong desire to help. That's precisely why we can't trust what we think. It's our behavior that inevitably reflects the hate within each of us. It is disguised as a helpful coping mechanism. We hate bigots, racists, and fundamentalists, but why? Because they hate us?
How does that make sense? This was the most challenging perspective to hold when I was growing up in Israel, where us Israeli kids were raised to hate Palestinians because they hate us, yet, Palestinian kids were raised to hate Israelis for the same reason. When I moved to the United States and befriended my first Palestinian, we both laughed at the absurdity of it all, even though it isn't really funny.
Personally, I think segregation is to blame. It seems harmless to categorize everything that is green or red into one group, but hatred ALWAYS stems from segregation. As Ani DiFranco said, I was five years old when they showed me a picture of three oranges and a pear. They asked me: which one is different and does not belong? They taught me that "different" is "wrong."
So I asked the activist, we'll call him Rob, if he unconsciously contributed to our segregated world in his own life, and although he didn't like admitting it, he said that having a special channel on TV for black people, BET, probably isn't a good idea. Or that perhaps it was necessary at a time but is outdated today.
And that going to gay clubs may have initially made sense as a safe space for him to go when our world was younger, but all they do now is segregate the community itself into even more sub-communities often pitted against one another. He laughed and said that even Netflix has an LGBTQ category for movies now, instead of simply categorizing each film as a comedy, drama, or a suspense.
For whose benefit does that segregation exist? So here's my question for you: Is there a difference between the hatred that the Neo-Nazi has toward Rob, and the hatred that Rob has toward the Neo-Nazi? In both cases, the hatred stems from fear of the unknown, panic that one person's way of life oppresses the other's, and a deep-rooted need to defend and protect the values that each holds at any cost. Even if one becomes the very instrument of death and misery to defend those values,
he still feels he is in the right. And why is that? Because in our compulsive need to label everything as either Wrong or Right, what do you think we label ourselves? Right. Exactly, every time. There is a difference between categorizing apple varieties in the grocery store and the aforementioned categorization on Netflix. One is rooted in hatred and segregation, and I'm not talking about the green apples
versus the red. We need to start by recognizing the unconscious hatred that is cleverly justified by our egos and disguised as something else within each of us. And then we can stop feeding the hate-based segregation that we are condoning in our lives without even realizing it. Like supporting businesses that benefit from systematically keeping us separate instead of uniting us. To better understand hatred, we must first be honest about where it resides.
And it's not just in other people, it's hiding within each of us. Disguised as self-righteousness, convenience, preference, or privilege, but it's there. And to do away with hatred, as Martin Luther King Jr. said: Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. And hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. The Buddhist invitation to "Do No Harm," is infuriating because we can't do no harm,
our very existence is harmful. So I say, Let's do LESS harm; that is a good place to start. I know this is a hot-button topic, so I hope you can join me on July 7th for the Live Q&A video discussion on Facebook, but if you can't, tune-in and I will upload the discussion highlights. Namaste. Timber Hawkeye is the bestselling author of Faithfully Religionless and Buddhist Boot Camp.
For additional information, please visit BuddhistBootCamp.com, where you can order autographed books to support the Prison Library Project, watch Timber's inspiring TED Talk, and join our monthly mailing list. We hope you have enjoyed this episode, and invite you to subscribe for more thought-provoking discussions. Thank you for being a Soldier of Peace in the Army of Love. 🙏🏼