Meeting Hatred with Love
by Dan Millman and Doug Childers
May 2005
Doug was born in rural Kentucky in the summer of 1956. His family rarely stayed in one place for more than two years, and by age 12, he had moved eight times to eight different states. In 1968, during the height of the Vietnam anti-war protests, Doug’s family moved to Grand Forks, North Dakota, a farming town with a university and a military base.

Tensions ran high between the local military families and the student protesters, whom Doug resembled only by virtue of his long hair. This was enough to arouse the animosity of his teachers and his junior high school peers. When a number of the tougher students began a campaign of physical harassment to force Doug to cut his hair, he refused to back down. As a result, for the next three years, both in and out of school, he endured pain and humiliation in the form of frequent physical assaults by groups of local toughs and teenage gangs.

For years after, Doug lived on alert, with a clenching fear and a burning anger. Then, in San Francisco at the age of 20, he began studying the martial arts. In his third year of intensive training, realizing he could now skillfully defend himself, he experienced an exhilarating sense of freedom. His fear of assault vanished, resulting in reckless confidence—on a number of occasions he roamed through San Francisco’s notorious Tenderloin district in the middle of the night, enjoying his sense of liberation in one of the city’s most dangerous, crime-ridden neighborhoods.

He never even considered that he might be tempting fate.

Meanwhile, his buried anger manifested itself in an endless stream of martial arts fantasies—mental rehearsals in which he visualized attacks like those he had suffered in earlier years now met with his newly cultivated fighting skills. Although philosophically disposed to pacifism, part of him secretly wanted a real-life payback against “the bad guys” for his years as a victim of violence.

Then, in 1978, while walking home from a friend’s at 3:00 a.m. one chilly San Francisco morning, Doug rounded the corner onto his street and saw two young men, about 30 yards ahead, dressed in black from their shoes to their knit wool caps. He felt a sudden chill at the sound of a high-pitched ping as one of them tapped a foot-long metal pipe against a brick building.

“Okay, guys,” he whispered, “just walk past my house and let me go inside.” One of the men glanced back, saw Doug, and nudged his friend. Now, they both looked back and began calling out taunting, threatening words. Doug felt a surge of adrenaline and kept walking—as he had refused to cut his hair years ago under threats and violence, he now refused to flee from his own house.

The two men stopped in the next doorway to wait for him.

As he approached the two men, Doug’s body felt electrified and his mind was uncommonly lucid. He felt certain he could handle the situation—they were two to his one but clearly overconfident; he was harmless looking, trained to fight multiple opponents, and had the element of surprise. With his senses heightened, Doug prepared for a fight he expected to last a few seconds.

As he drew near, he took note of their positions, visualized how they would come for him and what he would do. They would come out of the doorway—he’d throw his keys in the face of the one with the pipe and deliver sudden foot and hand strikes to stomach and head, as he’d practiced for years. In his mind’s eye, he saw them fall to the sidewalk, writhing in pain, mouths and noses bleeding from ruptured internal organs.

But in an instant, Doug experienced a radical reversal in consciousness that would change his life forever. The realization struck him that he had the power to injure these strangers, but not the power to heal them. A profound revulsion overwhelmed him—a sense of grief and remorse over what he was about to do. Suddenly, the scenario he had imaging, that was about to occur, made no sense. He describes what happened next:

“I now approached them with a kind of bemused bewilderment. My mind had shifted to an expanded perspective from which our little drama seemed utterly ludicrous. We three fools stood there among billions of people on earth, trapped in a silly game. It was obvious to me that we had no idea why we were doing this or even how we got on this planet. We’d never met, yet we were about to engage in mortal combat as if we were enemies. It was absurd! I felt a profound, exhilirating sense of brotherhood, even affection, for these two men. My fear and all plans of attack simply vanished. I didn’t decide not to fight—the possibility disappeared from my mind in a kind of divine amnesia I can’t explain to this day. I felt no fear, no sense of danger—only an absolute, joyous certainty that I loved these men as brothers.”

This view was not a strategy or philosophy, but a realization. Doug, a trained fighter with no religious background or experience, did not believe that love conquered all or that thinking positive thoughts could resolve a violent confrontation. In his usual frame of mind, this behavior would have been unrealistic and dangerous. But Doug was not in his usual frame of mind.

The two men stepped out of the doorway toward him, one with the pipe raised just as Doug had visualized. He grinned at them as if greeting long-lost friends—in his profoundly altered state, it literally never occurred to him that he was in any danger, that these men, his brothers, might harm him. “I was overjoyed to see them,” he recalls. With a huge smile, he looked into the eyes of a young black man about his age and said in a loud, affectionate voice, “Hey! How are you?” The man froze like a statue with his pipe in the air. Doug then smiled at his young Hispanic “friend” and said, “Good evening!”
Doug can still see the dumbstruck looks on their faces. “I think they felt that I loved them and they didn’t know what to do—they’d been short-circuited. I walked on—it felt like floating—two houses past them to my front door, in no hurry at all. I was flooded with ecstasy, surrounded by a marvelous presence. I saw with utter clarity the world bathed in light…it was absolutely alive, divinely perfect. I knew all human beings were my brothers and sisters. I loved the whole world and everyone in it. As I basked in this remarkable state, I heard the two men run off down the street.”

In the next days and weeks that followed, Doug pondered this experience. What, exactly, had transpired? It was far beyond an expansive mood or a lucky break. The event had changed his life. A former atheist and skeptic, the incident awakened in him a profound curiosity about the nature of reality and about God. It soon led him to the practices of prayer and meditation, in a spiritual search to which he would devote many years.

As Doug Childers relates it, “That event taught me there is always a higher solution to any difficulty, and when things get difficult, I look for that higher road. I also learned beyond any doubt that a mysterious presence and power is available to anyone who opens to it. Finally, I came to understand that the greatest power we have is our ability to make simple, loving contact with other human beings.”

Meeting hatred with love is one of the highest and most difficult practices of life. Doug would have been justified in defending himself and might even have taught these men a “lesson in manners.”

Instead, he realized that they were brothers after all.

Reprinted from: DIVINE INTERVENTIONS by Dan Millman and Doug Childers © 1999 by Dan Millman and Doug Childers. Permission granted by Rodale, Inc., Emmaus, PA 18098. Available wherever books are sold, or directly from the publisher at www.rodalestore.com.