The Spiritual Consequences of Hatred, Racial or Otherwise

From considerable experience, it is granted to learn that in the other life they meet with their relatives, friends, companions, and acquaintances, also [those] who were only known to them in life by reputation, and converse with them, and also are at first associated with them: for in the other life distance is of no moment [nihil facit]: those who are separated 1000, or it might be 10,000 miles, are near to them, yea everyone according to his life, so that they can be present next [to them]. Wherefore since it is so that relatives, parents, children, friends, companions and mere acquaintances wherever known [noti quocunque modo] meet each other, [still] it is exceedingly unfortunate for those, who have held any in hatred during the life of the body: these also come together and exercise their hatred, to the very great annoyance and misfortune of those whom they have held in hatred: nor does the multitude of souls cause any hindrance, as was given me to learn from very much experience. Wherefore let them beware of hatred: their life is so similar to their life in the body, that, as regards life, they do not know but they are in the life of the body. - Emanuel Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary 2661

 All racial hatred, for instance, is really also a fight against the spirit. Because this age of ours is so strongly inclined to fight against the spirit, it therefore possesses this talent for racial hatred. Here is one of the deepest secrets of our present spiritual culture; the only way out is through the living grasp of the spirit.Just think how, the moment we fall asleep and our ego and astral body leave behind our physical and etheric bodies, we are in a world where all that leads to sympathy and antipathy simply does not exist. In the moment that follows falling asleep we are united with those whom we look upon from the consciousness of our time with the deepest antipathy. We must pass through their souls in the realm of interpenetrability. We can rage as we will and hurl tirades of hatred against this man or that, but as soon as we fall asleep and enter the realm where all interpenetrates, we must pass through the souls of those we hate. The facts concerning such actual realities must now be made known. What I have just said is elementary, but if one enters more and more into the knowledge of actual reality, then the very entering possesses the force to create the impulse of the good. One only learns to know the real significance of hatred and unfounded antipathy in the world when one sees their effects in the spiritual world. He who knows what hate is in the spiritual world ceases to hate lest he put himself straight into the service of certain evil powers. - Rudolf Steiner, Inner Impulses of Evolution, Lecture IV