Love or Hatred

Love or hatred, heaven or hell. The choice is that simple. If I love my brother, I find heaven. If I hate my brother, I find hell. The more love I have for everyone, no matter how irritating or furious they make me, the more I love myself. If we hate our brother, we can expect to find people who hate us. If we despise someone, we can expect to be despised by them or by someone else.

The golden rule or the law of karma is what is at play here. What we give out, we receive. Just as there are degrees of dislike, there are also degrees of love. Acceptance and even some forms of tolerance can be loving acts. They don’t carry with them the same feelings we might have for a friend or lover, but they certainly are far better than the feelings of barely tolerating, disliking, loathing, judging, hating, or shunning.

Heaven, nirvana, or whatever we choose to call the afterlife, is thought to be a place we go to — or hope we got to — after we die. But, according to many religious teachings, we can achieve a measure of that existence here on Earth. It’s our choice to either spend our days in hell through our hatred or in heaven/nirvana by choosing to love our brothers and sisters no matter how wicked or hateful we perceive them to be.