Got Hatred? Don’t Feed Your Reptilian Brain

 

There’s a spiritual teacher I follow on Youtube, Matt Kahn, who said the most profound thing I’ve ever heard.

It’s this: the most important question for someone on a path of truth and awareness isn’t “Who am I?” but “Who am I when I don’t get my way?”

Who am I when my Ego/False Self feels threatened? Or when my tribes and related identity feel threatened, because I consider those an extension of myself?

My baseball team. My culture. My religion. My family. My music. My food choices. My beliefs. My survival.

Think about it.

Who do you become when someone doesn’t agree with you? Or has a different religious belief? Or tells you you’re either “with them” or “against them”, or that they think it’s okay to punish, kill and generally dehumanize other people because those other people are “bad”?

I can tell you how I feel. Angry.

It’s a self-righteous anger, that bubbles up from the depths of my amygdala (the primitive, reptilian part of my brain that is all about MY survival). It sends a message to my body that releases adrenaline, which is tied to primal aggression, originally used to fight over scarce resources. The message it’s sending is “Danger! Danger! I must protect, defend and attack, because I’m not getting what I want! And what I want is more important than what others want!”

 

So What Do I Want?

Well, world peace, of course. I want to help create what some call the “New Earth”, where we at least attempt to give a shit about other people who are different from us. Where we make an effort to love and understand each other, even when it’s hard, and even when others’ behaviour makes no sense to us. Even when we’re under attack by those other people, because they’re in so much pain their brains have become flooded with hate.

But, just so you know, if you don’t happen agree with me—if you believe it’s okay to label other people in ways that make it easier for you to pretend they’re not human; if you believe it’s okay to hate and to drum up hate for other people; if you believe there’s any such thing as an “us” and a “them”, then I can tell you right now, there’s gonna be some tension between us. Because, guess what? I’m gonna want to punish you for thinking that way. I’m gonna want to explain to you, with as much excruciating detail as possible, what a self-deluded asshole you are.

But wait a minute. That can’t be right, can it?

I mean. Wouldn’t it be hypocritical of me to want to attack and punish people who hurt others, if I believe in practicing love toward everyone, including our so-called enemies?

Uh, yeah. It’s hypocritical all right. Big time. And, yet, we all do it. Every goddamn day.

That’s why, even though I will want to do that, I won’t do it. Instead, I’ll do my damnedest to breathe and stay present, even though my body will be coursing with adrenaline. Hence the tension you’ll probably feel.

Because we all have this ancient piece of technology in our heads called the amygdala, which is still focused on the bottom rung of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: physiological survival.

This part of our brain believes that, if it doesn’t get exactly what it wants, then it is under threat.

And it’s quite sure that what it wants is more important, more relevant, and more TRUE, than what anyone else wants. And it will give you absolute permission and encouragement to judge, hate and lash out at anyone who disagrees with its “Truth”.

 

The Cycle of Anger

The process looks something like this:

1. Something happens that you don’t want to happen. It could happen to you, or to someone you consider an extension of yourself (i.e. your tribe)
2. You choose to see yourself (and/or your tribe) as a victim. You begin telling yourself stories about how unfair it is that this thing happened, which you most certainly did not deserve. (Core feelings: sadness, shame, helplessness)
3. The survival-based part of your brain generates a feeling of anger to protect you from being incapacitated by sadness, shame and helplessness (because these feelings are paralyzing, which makes it hard for us to hunt/gather food and chop wood for our survival).
   1. At this stage you have an opportunity to look at the anger from a compassionate place, understanding that it is not caused by the other person’s behaviour, but that it is generated by your own brain as a primal safety mechanism in response to their behaviour, because it feels threatened.
4.  If you choose to feed this anger with more stories about the unfairness of life and your own victim role in everything, rather than working to process and release the anger, by exploring compassion for yourself and your perpetrator, your anger will grow through the following stages:
   1. resentment
   2. bitterness
   3. hatred

 
(Sidenote: If you are struggling with pain/anger inside of you, use this formula to understand and process it )

Once you have hatred in your heart, it’s a short path to becoming a perpetrator of hateful behaviour yourself. To recap, anger (and eventually, hatred) is usually a reaction to feelings of pain, shame or helplessness (or all three!). So the trick is to deal with those underlying feelings. What this means is, you’ll never meet a perpetrator who wasn’t, at one time, a victim.

When you fight hate with more hate, you become what you hate, capable of monstrous behaviour toward others. The survival part of a brain is like a crocodile; it is cold, calculating, and does not give a shit about other human beings. Sociopaths live primarily from this part of their brain.

It allows us, not only to judge and hate other people, but also to justify using others to meet our needs. For example, we allow people in developing countries to make our t-shirts and shoes, even though their working conditions are inhuman, and the buildings they work in occasionally collapse and crush them.

I own a couple of Joe Fresh t-shirts myself, which I bought because they were cheap. And I can tell you that, ever since I learned people died in a factory in Bangladesh making those t-shirts, I can’t wear them without picturing their bodies all tangled in a heap, just so I could save $10.

 

The Fight…To Stop Fighting

I strongly believe that those of us who are on a path of truth and awareness have a responsibility to stand at the forefront of this fight against the primitive tendency inside of us to care mainly about our own survival, hating anyone who stands in our way. And as a fellow human being, I’ll be the first to admit this is hard.

Because hate feels powerful and self-righteous. It’s intoxicating. Your heart’s pounding, your body’s pumping with adrenaline and you feel like you could take on the world! And it’s really, really  easy to become addicted to that feeling, especially if we feel powerless in other areas of our lives. When you have a group of people all pumped up on this drug, it can end with lynchings and genocides (like Rwanda, where people were incited to hatred by a radio program, that fed into ideas of competition and scarcity).

 

Whatever We Feed Will Grow

We can’t choose to not feel anger and judgment. Sometimes hatred will spontaneously pop up, whether we like it or not. Unless you have a lobotomy, you’re going to have these feelings; it’s part of the challenge of being human.

And, for sanity’s sake, please don’t bullshit yourself into believing you’re above that (I’m looking at you Spiritual Rockstars). Unless you’re the Dalai fucking Lama, you’re not. And the sooner you embrace that, the less dangerous you’ll be to yourself and others.

The solution isn’t ignoring or repressing the problem. The solution is understanding and awareness that leads to better decisions. We can decide whether we’ll feed the reptilian, scarcity based part of our brain, or our more evolved, rational and compassionate part (the pre-frontal cortex).

We are all a mix of light and dark, love and hate, happy hormones and aggressive hormones. What differentiates us is what parts of us we choose to feed, and what parts we choose to starve.

 

A Call For The Courageous

I am on a personal mission to starve the reptilian part of my brain that generates self-righteous pity, anger, judgment and hatred. And to nurture my brain’s higher capacities of compassionate reasoning + love for myself and others.

Why? Because I believe it’s in my True Self’s interest to do so.

Love feels better than hate. Sharing feels better than competing. Compassion feels better than judgment. And this is where a new world begins–inside of you and me. As inside, also outside.

And then there’s also the tricky fact that most of our anger arises out of old, unhealed pain inside of us that gets projected onto outside people and events. (I wrote about that last year in this post).

If you hate a person, you hate something in them that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us. ~Hermann Hesse, 1877-1962

Obviously, I can’t lecture others to do what I can only sloppily but consistently attempt to do myself. But I can invite you to be part of this movement to feed the rational and compassionate part of our brains, and starve the reptilian part.

Will you join me?

Before you answer, I’m going to be honest with you. Most of the world will not join us. They will tell us we’re crazy. They’ll tell us that hate is natural, that anger is necessary, that scarcity and competition is the norm. They’ll especially insist that attempting to have compassion for other people who are full of hate is for sissies.

But here’s what I say to that: Let’s prove those motherfuckers wrong. ;)

(P.S. If you want to share your thoughts on this post, drop by my Facebook page. )

Rise up as your True Self,

Shawn xo