Mystic Mantra: Hate cannot dispel hate, love dispels hate

The newspapers are full of reports of honour killings or beating someone to death in the name of caste or religion. Surprisingly, these killers are not professional murderers — they are just ordinary people around us, maybe in our family, in the neighbourhood or a customer in a hotel. But a small incident is enough to trigger their killer instinct and they don’t hesitate to kill people out of blind wrath.

It seems what people need urgently is not more money or more power or more politics — they need to learn how to love, how to remove hatred in the heart and fill it with compassion instead. Therefore, on Buddha’s anniversary, it will be worthwhile to remind ourselves of the precious message of the Buddha: “In this world, hate never yet dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law, ancient and inexhaustible.”

Why can hate not be dispelled by hatred? Because hatred is like darkness and love is light. Just as darkness cannot dispel darkness, hatred cannot dispel hatred. Darkness is an absence, light is a presence. How can that which is absent remove itself?

Osho unfolds the subtle layers of Buddha’s words: Love and hate cannot meet because hate exists with the past and the future — love needs no past, no future. Love exists in the present. If somebody abused you yesterday you are carrying it like a wound. Or you are afraid that somebody is going to abuse you tomorrow — a fear, a shadow of the fear lingers. And you are already getting ready to encounter it. Hatred starts fostering in your heart.

You cannot hate in the present. Sit silently and try to hate somebody in the present, with no reference to the past or the future… you cannot do it. Love needs no reference — that’s the beauty and the freedom of love. Hate is imprisonment — imposed by you upon yourself. And hate creates more hate. If you hate somebody, you are creating hate in that person’s heart for yourself. And the whole world exists in hate, in destructiveness, in violence, in jealousy and in competitiveness. People are at each other’s throats either in reality or at least in their thoughts — everybody is murdering, killing.

In this context, Osho points out that the love the Buddha talks about is not what you understand by love. Your love is nothing but the other side of hate. In fact it is hate disguised as love — that’s why your love can turn into hate at any moment. True love is a spontaneous welling up of joy in you, and the sharing of it, and the showering of it — for no reason. Like the birds singing in the morning, the cuckoo calling from the distance — for no reason. The heart is so full of joy that a song bursts forth. And if you can move into the dimension of this love, you will be in paradise immediately. So bring the light in. Become silent, thoughtless, conscious, alert, aware and awake — this is how light is brought in. And the moment you are alert and aware, hate will not be found. These are experiments to be done, not just words to be understood.