Anger - Interesting stuff

Brad Warner on Anger

I'd always believed that anger was somehow something apart from myself, that 'I' experienced 'my' anger. But as my Zen practice deepened it began to dawn on me that this was not the case at all. It wasn't that I could eradicate those qualities about myself I'd labeled as negative, while leaving the good stuff intact, like cutting off the rotten parts of a carrot left in the fridge too long and cooking the rest. I had to die completely. The source of anger, hate and fear was the same as the source of that collection of ideas and habits I had mistakenly called 'me' for most of my life...

It isn't just anger and other so-called 'negative' states that are the problem. It is that whole collection of things you call your 'self'. The very same force that makes it possible for you to gush all over a fuzzy little puppy dog with icky sweet love is the force that makes it possible for you to hate with passion and lash out with anger. There is no love without hate, no happiness without depression. It's like a rollercoaster. If you go up, you're gonna have to come back down.

Hate can be your teacher. Anger can be your guide. It's a mistake to try and overcome them with emotions that seem to be their opposites. Emotions all stem from the same source. See your anger for what it is and then you can see yourself for what you are. And yet there is something else ... for want of a better term, I'll call it 'joy'.

Joy is not bliss, by the way. Bliss is what you get from a heroin overdose. Numbness is numbness no matter how many 'spiritual masters' tell you it's bliss. Joy cannot be willed into being by thought or by cultivating vague memories of past experiences of it, even if those experiences were true. It comes only when body and mind are in perfect balance. And - more importantly - when we are at perfect balance with our own circumstances, when we no longer fight against reality. Not fighting against reality doesn't mean mindlessly accepting the way things are without trying to change anything. In fact, the only way to change your circumstances is to stop fighting them. To do this we have to understand clearly what we really are at every moment.

If you're serious about transcending anger you must be willing to give up everything. I'm afraid most people - including many who say they're Buddhists - are not at all serious about it. We've invented a million clever methods of building up our ego while pretending to tear it down.

If you learn to appreciate and fully experience each and every moment just as it is, anger will become less and less of a problem until it finally disappears entirely. Anger begins very small. It's always based upon the difference between how you think things should be and how they actually are. Within this gap, the fiction known as 'you' appears and reacts. In order to protect this fiction, you start to justify your anger, to build a convincing case to prove to yourself you have the right be angry. This can happen quickly, so it's important to stay right on top of it. To repress anger consciously means you do not allow yourself any excuses. You do not accept any of the justifications for anger your ego coughs up, no matter how reasonable you can make them sound. This is the only way to reach the source of anger and be finished with it completely.

I fought hard against this, like an alcoholic fights against the realisation that the only way to stop being an alcoholic is to just stop drinking. He can no longer fool himself with the idea that he can drink today and then quit tomorrow. I could no longer pretend it was OK to get angry today about some situation in which I was clearly in the right as long as I didn't get angry at my girlfriend when we argued.

Anger always stems from the belief that you are right and your circumstances are somehow 'wrong'. When you think you're right - when you know for certain you're right - in the face of circumstances that are somehow 'wrong', that's when you need to look hard at what's actually happening inside. Your habit of reacting with anger has been built up over long years of reinforcement from a society gone terribly wrong. Society is made up of people all clinging to the fiction of ego who draw support for this idea from the fact that so many others believe it.

But you have to take this all the way ... as far as it can go. You can't stop at anger. You have to see love, kindness, selflessness and compassion the same way. Your ideas of these 'positive' states can be just as much of a hindrance as anger.

It's a dire mistake to view our ordinary state as a thing we can somehow fix by forcing it to conform to a self-invented ideal. If we don't understand our own delusions - including the delusions we call 'positive' clearly, we'll never know if what we label as 'love' is the real deal or just another fantasy thrown up by our over-stimulated imaginations. Anger arises out of the belief in the individual self. When there is no 'you' there is nothing for 'you' to get angry about, and nobody outside yourself to feel angry with.