anger

[Guest guest]

Leaf,

 

> Hello,

> I have a question. I'm having problems with something. I have outbursts of

> anger a lot of times, and I know that to get to enlightenment, I have to stop

> those. I have them for no apparent reason. Then, I feel really bad. Please

> help me.

>

As Rob said, the anger-enlightenment relationship is the other way around.

The more the enlightenment, the less the anger.

 

What then is enlightenment? At least in the early stages it is having enough

insight not to identify with the anger. Rather than perceive the situation

as " I am angry " you give the feeling some distance, " There is anger going

on " . You can then begin non-judgmentally to observe the anger and its many

features and relationships.

 

There are at least two beautiful aspects to anger: its energy and its

gallant battle for survival. Do you think anger would have existed for

thousands of years if it were not useful? We need to understand the

conditions under which it is useful and the conditions under which it is

unskillful. Perhaps the fully enlightened are so skillful that for them

anger is an obsolete strategy. For the rest of us, it may be the best way we

can think of to cope in a particular situation.

 

The problem occurs if we identify with the anger. Then we lose our inner

peace and objectivity. If we distance ourselves from our anger, we may not

eliminate it, but we can keep it from robbing us from our inner peace.

 

An interesting thing happens as we disidentify from our anger. We

increasingly find that our angry reaction is silly. What we are angry about

just isn't that important. We drop it. I wonder if something like that is

what you were describing when you said you were forgetting things.

 

Rob brings up another issue that is interesting to me. What is the role of

understanding the cause of our anger? Sometimes exploring the cause of our

anger is just another way of stoking the anger. Better just to drop it.

Sometimes, however, exploring the cause of our anger is a way of

understanding a situation so we can see if our anger is based on a

misunderstanding or perhaps is an unskillful way of responding to it. In

brief, sometimes exploring the cause of our anger is just another way of

attaching to it and sometimes exploring is useful. The more we disidentify

with the anger, the better we can tell which is which.

 

Gary Schouborg

Performance Consulting

Walnut Creek, CA

garyscho

 

Publications and professional services:

http://home.att.net/~garyscho