Essential Practice

Love Dispels Hate

Aes dhammo sanantano – this is the law, eternal, ancient and inexhaustible.

What is the law? That hate never dispelled hate – darkness cannot dispel darkness – that only love dispels hate. Only light can dispel darkness: love is light, the light of your being, and hate is the darkness of your being. If you are dark inside, you go on throwing hate all around you. If you are light within, luminous, then you go on radiating light around you. A sannyasin has to be a radiant love, a radiant light.

Aes dhammo sanantano. Buddha repeats this again and again – this is the eternal law. What is eternal law? Only love dispels hate, only light dispels darkness. Why? – Because darkness in itself is only a negative state; it has no positive existence of its own. It does not really exist – how can you dispel it? You cannot do anything directly to darkness. If you want to do anything to darkness you will have to do something with light. Bring light in and darkness is gone, take light out and darkness comes in. But you cannot bring darkness in or out directly – you cannot do anything with darkness. 

Remember, you cannot do anything with hate either.

And that’s the difference between moral teachers and religious mystics: moral teachers go on propounding the false law. They go on propounding: “Fight with darkness – fight with hate, fight with anger, fight with sex, fight with this, fight with that!” Their whole approach is “Fight the negative,” while the real, true master teaches you the positive law, aes dhammo sanantano – the eternal law: “Do not fight with darkness.” And hate is darkness, and sex is darkness, and jealousy is darkness, and greed is darkness and anger is darkness.

Bring the light in. How is the light brought in? Become silent, thoughtless, conscious, alert, aware, awake – this is how light is brought in. And the moment you are alert, aware, hate will not be found. Try to hate somebody with awareness…

These are experiments to be done, not just words to be understood – experiments to be done. That’s why I say don’t try to understand only intellectually: become existential experimenters.

Try to hate somebody consciously and you will find it impossible. Either consciousness disappears, then you can hate; or if you are conscious, hate disappears. They can’t exist together. There is no coexistence possible: light and darkness cannot exist together – because darkness is nothing but the absence of light.

The true masters teach you how to attain godliness; they never say renounce the world. Renunciation is negative. They don’t tell you to escape from the world, they teach you to escape into godliness. They teach you to attain truth, not to fight with lies. And lies are millions. If you go on fighting it will take millions of lives, and still nothing will be attained. And truth is one; hence truth can be attained instantly, this very moment it is possible.

You too shall pass away. Knowing this, how can you quarrel?

Life is so short, so momentary, and you are wasting it in quarreling? Use the whole energy for meditation – it is the same energy. You can fight with it or you can become a light through it.