21 Aversion to 'certain people'-the mirror image of attachment to the idealised self

I've recently fallen out with a very accomplished gay couple who have been wanting to be friends of ours for years. It’s given me lots of cause for reflection on the nature of aversion and what it is that determines whether one likes or dislikes someone. I was reading a Buddhist text yesterday- 'Mindfulness: The Path to the Deathless'-on the principle of Aversion and it suddenly struck me where I’ve been going wrong.

The idea as I understood it is that when it comes to not liking people –it’s not people that you get an aversion towards- the aversion is in your mind and it is created out of whatever desires you have to be or become. Once you have created that context, aversion flows quite naturally from that. So that anyone who threatens to undermine your fantasy of who you are, what you desire to have or become, becomes an enemy. The extent of your aversion will be directly proportional to the extent to which your ego is threatened.

It means that no matter how worthy your aspirations may be you will always find your bete noire to do battle with and that will be a constant source of suffering to you. The Buddhist idea is to endeavour to just be who you are. Don’t develop an elaborate ego that demands feeding with attachments and defending from attack.

It’s really quite counter to the Judeo-Christian idea of aspiring to be good and nice and doing battle with those who are bad and not so nice. Trouble is that the gooder and nicer you aspire to be the badder and nastier are the enemies that surround you!

So consequently the long and the short of it is that on reflection and following deep introspection, I think that my falling out with the couple who have been keen to be our friends was born from the first weeks of meeting them and sensing that there was a selfishness and a callous disregard towards those they identified as  ‘outsiders’. (That's right you guessed it- I really prize selflessness and inclusion of outsiders)

It’s taken years for me to actually locate my discomfort. And it’s been complicated by the fact that my partner was ‘best mates’ with one of the couple and the intensity of that friendship petered out for its own reasons. However, in the final analysis, although I would instinctively point the finger of blame for the falling out at “them”, the only one who can be responsible for the creation and destruction of the friendship, as I perceived it-is me. I am the author, in my head, of who is nice, not nice, acceptable, and unacceptable. And I, for whatever reason, allowed a longstanding relationship to grow between myself and some people who were, right from the start, somehow not acceptable to me!

So what have I learned?

The big lesson here for me is to become aware of the rules I’m making up about my aspirations and be conscious that every layer of ego that I acquire leads to an other layer of aversion towards another swathe of people. I suppose true happiness can be found if it’s possible to disintegrate the accretions of ego that have grown over the years. I suppose that would be the path to having the capacity to love unconditionally and universally. Now that would be an interesting aspiration!