I spent hours yesterday (Friday) trying to experience the hatred – and more specifically the self-hatred – that Archangel Michael says lies at the core of male mistreatment and subordination of women.
I know that AAM is aware that I live and breathe the Growth Movement, which was all about exploring the self/Self. I suspect that’s why he gave me this particular assignment.
Though very unpleasant, the assignment has an element of learning in it that interests me. It’s almost like a dare.
Going into one’s own hatred is not like donning a weighted belt as a diver, diving into the sea, and falling to the bottom.
It’s more like diving into the Great Salt Lake and hoping to get to the bottom but you can’t. You can’t overcome the buoyancy factor. (1)
What I could re-experience was irritation, frustration, grumpiness, etc. But I got to see that the kind of hatred that he seemed to be pointing at was another order of magnitude deeper than I could reach.
I attribute much of this inability to the impact of the Tsunami of Love. It’s getting harder and harder to go lower and lower. The floor keeps rising until I can no longer access states I once may have been in or knew.
In a flash insight, I remember feeling a subterranean hatred not so long ago. And I remember seeing that I felt that hatred all my life. But that now seems like a mild form, not anything strong enough to induce me to harm another. Enough to make me a recluse and a lone wolf, but that’s about it.
That’s not to say that I don’t argue with people. I believe I have a reputation for doing so. I argue with all people whom I believe won’t let me know them, who have an act they try to sell me instead of “meeting” me as their native self.
That vasana comes from living in a family where almost everyone was hiding the domestic violence that occurred and then requiring me to lie about what I knew. At some point I swore I would never hide or lie about what was actually going on. My transparency is actually vasana-driven – until it’s not.
But, and it’s a stunning revelation to me, I now see that I did not live in the kind of hatred that we’re trying to understand. Or, if I did, I’ve blocked the memory of it. I always thought I did.
Enough cuffing, kicking and being criticized would have a person hate, I thought. But that has turned out not to be the case. It takes more than that to make a person hate.
Perhaps there’s another factor that needs to be there before we hate. And I don’t know what that factor is.
At this moment, if I’m to see what induces a man to torment and control a woman, some new approach is needed.
One member of the team asked me to go back to the two incidents when my Mom was slugged. That may furnish me with a door into hatred. She also invited me to go back to past lives, especially lives spent as a warrior.
Is it possible that any issues – like mine about hiding – combined with social pressure could serve as a road in?
Is it possible I’m seeing the situation altogether different than how it is? Could it be that hatred in the countries where gender persecution is rampant was an episodic factor and not a permanent pattern?
No, I don’t think so for two reasons: The first is the almost kneejerk manner in which so many male leaders like General Pervaez Musharaf defend such patterns of brutality. That suggests the patterns of behavior in question are well-socialized, well-conditioned.
The second is the entire mien or comportment of women in my hearing room. They were terrified and often looked defeated. I don’t think that kind of terror and sense of defeat can come from episodic behavior on the part of males.
Often AAM does not tell me the answer to a question directly, but requires me to find the answer myself or find it in myself. If what he wanted to show me was what I can reach and what I can’t, well and good. But if he wants me to find the motivating factor of gender persecution in myself, it continues to elude me so far.
And, yes, I have considered the risk that, finding it, I may not be able to come back from it. But there I trust that the Company of Heaven would not recommend such an experiment if it posed a risk for me.
What does all this mean in the present situation?
It means that, unless I can reach the levels of hatred that he’s pointing at as the chief motivator of gender persecution, I’ll have intellectual knowledge, but not experiential knowledge. I won’t know it down to my bones and I won’t be able to speak from experiential knowledge on it.
Unless the suggested approaches work or I can find the mechanism by some other means, I may never know what drives a man to do the really awful things we read about in the human-rights literature.
Footnotes
(1) Yes, the Great Salt Lake is not deep so you can’t dive deep anyways.