Outsmarting anger

As a follow up to the question, “How many thoughts out of 10 do you not choose or control?” (see this article: Control your thoughts or they’ll control you), I recently asked some perfectly calm-looking people how many of those 9 out of 10 uncontrolled, unpeaceful thoughts were related to aversion or anger? Interestingly, most of them said most of them. Which reminded me of Venerable Geshe Kelsang’s comment:

Anger is one of the most common and destructive delusions, and it afflicts our mind almost every day. ~ How to Solve our Human Problems

If anger is indeed an unpeaceful, uncontrolled state of mind, would it be a good idea to get to the bottom of it? Anger appears to arise out of nowhere sometimes, an unwilling or involuntary response to a provocation, sometimes justified – perhaps – sometimes not. But it doesn’t in fact come out of nowhere fully and all at once. Within the definition of anger given in Buddhism, we can see that anger has distinct stages:

Anger is a deluded mind that focuses on an animate or inanimate object, feels it to be unattractive, exaggerates its bad qualities, and wishes to harm it.

Due to deep-seated familiarity these stages can be the speed of light such that we don’t even notice them; but it can be very helpful to Slo-mo our anger in retrospect. For, if we understand its stages, we understand its causes. And if we understand its causes, we understand how to prevent it from arising in the first place.

The stages of anger   

Perhaps settle the mind first with some breathing meditation and feel identified with your sky-like, clear Buddha nature. Within that accepting and calm context, remember the last time you got angry with someone, whether a lot or a little, and what that felt like and what YOU felt like. Ask yourself: “Would I rather (1) stay calm, sane, and peaceful or (2) be constantly bent out of shape and miserable?” If (1), we can now see if these stages apply.

Stage 1

For example, when we are angry with our partner, at that moment he or she appears to us as unattractive or unpleasant. ~ How to Solve our Human Problems

That’s the first thing that happens – perhaps someone failed to fulfill a promise or didn’t take out the trash and, whatever it was, they now appear in some way unpleasant. There’s some unhappiness beginning to arise, “I don’t like this.”

Stage 2

We don’t now have to feed it, we could drop this unpleasant discrimination and think about something else; but we DO feed it:

We then exaggerate his bad qualities by focusing only on those aspects that irritate us and ignoring all his good qualities and kindness …

This so-called “inappropriate attention”, or what I sometimes call “faulty thinking”, is what is both creating and feeding the monster, as it were. It is engaging in selective editing of this person, leaving all the good bits on the cutting room floor.

Take the woman barging out the doorway in this recent article, How to deal with difficult situations. If instead of dropping that unpleasant appearance of her being in my way, I start conjecturing, “Well, she’s probably always like this. She probably drives everybody around her crazy”, that exaggeration is building up a story by focusing ONLY on her faults, real or imagined, while ignoring all her good qualities and kindness. She could be a lovely person. She probably has loads of people who love her. She could be having a really bad day or have just received some terrible news. She definitely wants to be happy and she may just want to get through the day in one piece. But anger doesn’t care about any of that stuff. Anger doesn’t care about any redeeming features whatsoever. Anger, profoundly egotistical as it is, gives no monkeys about what she’s thinking or feeling. Anger doesn’t care about truth or facts. Anger is only interested in people’s faults. It’s a very crude mind, in fact, a very blunt instrument.

… until we have built up a mental image of an intrinsically faulty person.

The person who simply appeared unpleasant now seems to be bad through and through, in and of themselves, intrinsically. This has nothing to do with how I am looking at them; they are simply problematical from their own side. True?

Stage 3

And then what happens? Because they seem to be the true source of my unpleasant feelings, either they have to change or something has to happen to them in order for my unpleasant feelings to go away:

We then wish to harm him in some way, probably by criticizing or disparaging him.

Even if we hide our disapproval while seething silently, we still want that person to change or apologize or get out of the way. Or we may act on our anger verbally or physically, such as raising our voice or shooting off a text that we instantly regret. Or worse. All the violence, aggression, killing, bombing and so on, all these wars, where are they really coming from? Regardless of geopolitical complications, without the wish to harm, what would happen to all this fighting? Who would have the heart to fight?

But people are not intrinsically anything, right? Like us, they just want to be happy and free. Sometimes we can spot how anger works from the times people have gotten angry with us – when they’ve pegged us in an unfair way and poured superglue over that version. And maybe we want to point out that there is a lot more to us than they are giving us credit for, that we are not really all that bad, sure we may have messed up but there is still a great deal more to us than our faults, we have an enormous interior landscape and potential just like them, I thought you knew me by now?! But are they interested? Of course not. Or rather, their anger is not interested.

Anger is trying to destroy a mental image of its own creation. But the only way to drop the mental image of an enemy is to drop the mind creating it – the anger itself. As Venerable Geshe-la said in a teaching:

Love is the real nuclear bomb that destroys all our enemies, because when we love all living beings, we have no enemies.

A blunt instrument

The thing is, nobody is intrinsically bad. Nobody is all bad. People have delusions, and delusions are not great – but people are not their delusions. People also have Buddha nature. People have the wish to be happy and free from suffering, just like us – but they are not as happy as they’d like to be and in fact they are in pain an awful lot of the time. People also have a lot of good qualities and kindness. However, anger does not see any of that. Anger sees the entire person as somehow faulty or bad, and that’s what I mean by a blunt instrument because, if someone appears all bad, then we want to beat them over the head or something. We want some harm to befall them, or we want them to go away or disappear, and sometimes we even want them to die. Anger leads to killing, doesn’t it? All violent, aggressive actions come from believing that the entire person is inherently faulty.

We divide the world into good people and bad people. That can change week by week, even day by day. People who agree with us are the good people, and everyone else is the bad people. And how’s that going for all of us? Then we want to beat all the bad people over the head and get together with the good people to discuss how bad the bad people are.

We’re all doing it. We’re projecting enemies and friends with our aversions and our attachments. The world is not full of bad people and good people – it is full of people who are a mixed bag. They have indestructible spiritual potential and the wish to be free and happy, and they are also afflicted by the disease of the delusions. We get to choose what we focus on.

Probably the most important thing to really take to heart, if we want to stop getting angry with people, is that people are not their delusions. (More about that in this article: How can I blame you?) However badly they’re behaving, that behavior’s coming from their delusions – it’s coming from their greed, anger, confusion, selfishness, pride, and so on. But people are not their delusions. People have delusions like the sky has weather. Tornadoes can cause a lot of damage, but they are still never the sky itself. Even when people do very bad things, which they do, we can learn not to get angry but to respond instead with a controlled and sane mind. This will obviously help us, but it will also help them, and be of more help to their victims.

Engaging with children

Have you ever seen (or been?!) a mother with a toddler melting down in the supermarket because he dropped his ice lolly? Did she throw the kid in the trash? Unlikely. She doesn’t hate the child at this point. Why? Why is a mother able to be (even relatively) patient and keep loving her child when he’s screaming at the top of his lungs, throwing things everywhere, and embarrassing her? Why is a mother able to keep the love even as she acknowledges that the child is behaving badly and ungratefully?

Isn’t it because she sees very clearly that her poor child is having some problem, some delusion? She knows this because she knows the child, she knows the child’s potential, and she wants the child to go back to being happy. She sees the child as dear, beloved, and beautiful, but clearly in a bad mood, and, if anything, she develops more compassion because it’s clear to her that he’s suffering from this bad mood. She may have to discipline the child, but she does it because she wants to help him, not harm him.

 In this instance the mother is naturally distinguishing between the child and the child’s delusions. Buddhas do this all the time; and, if you think about it, there’s no reason why we can’t learn to as well. As it says in The New Eight Steps to Happiness:

It is because they distinguish between delusions and persons that Buddhas are able to see the faults of delusions without ever seeing a single fault in any sentient being. Consequently, their love and compassion for sentient beings never diminish. ~ from the chapter “Enhancing cherishing love”.

Buddha even called us “the childish”, perhaps because our world is full of big babies or adolescents gone mad, take your pick – but none of us is our delusions. We all just want to be happy. We all just want to be free. But we don’t know how to go about it. Dropping our ice lolly or its equivalent seems like a catastrophe; we don’t know how to handle disappointments like this. We are fragile, childish, actually under the influence of the darkest confusion, not knowing what we’re doing.

Which means that living beings, if you think about it, are objects of compassion. (This includes ourself, by the way). They don’t have to be the objects of our anger. We get to choose. Do we really want to develop the painful mind of anger all the time whenever anyone does something we don’t like, which could be every day for the rest of our lives? Or do we want to try and develop some compassion here, understanding that they’re in pain so much of the time? That they’re trapped in samsara? This doesn’t mean we have to excuse their behavior. But nor do we have to hate them, even if we have to try and sort out any problems they’ve created.

Never abandon love for any being

I’ve been meditating a lot on that Bodhisattva and Tantric precept never to abandon love for any being, which I find so profound in this divided age; and perhaps this is why I had an interesting humanizing dream the other night. For some reason, I found myself sharing this dream with an woman I randomly bumped into on a hike the next day, who later texted me to say how helpful she was finding it. So I’m going to share it with you, too. I can’t mention names as I steer clear of politics, so you can substitute your own current arch enemies depending on your views.

The dream involved two high profile figures who have been having an outsize influence on our world lately. One of them was grabbing helium balloons tightly in his hands, and these were carrying him higher and higher above everyone else. He was grinning at me like this was a good thing, but I knew that those balloons were going to deflate any moment now, and that he would come crashing down. And I was sad, hoping that he would not go too high and land too hard, really hurting himself. For the other, I was looking at him from a distance, judging him silently and reproachfully, when he turned toward me with a big, warm, genuine smile and said, “Hello L! How lovely it is to see you again!” My heart melted. I felt like I had known him for ages. Since that dream I have had a different perception of these two characters. I don’t agree with them any more than I did before, to be honest, but I care about them as well now, not just the people suffering from their deluded actions. I see them as unwitting weapons of their delusions, which are setting them up for lifetimes of sadness.

 Kitten thought experiment

Not unrelated to this, and in case it works for you, I am going to share a thought experiment I use when I’m having trouble with dictators, autocrats, bullies, or other people exercising cruelty in positions of power. Right now I have four one-pound kittens living with me, and they are all adorable and vulnerable, I would like to protect them to the ends of the earth. But they have only been kittens for a month or two, so who were they before?

What if someone with whom you have a big problem dies and takes rebirth as a kitten just like one of these, and you end up fostering them? Someone you trust introduces you, “Hey, L, would you believe!, this is so and so!?” Would you now hate them? Or would you feel even more compassion for them?

Fact is, people’s cruel and negative actions are paving the way for their lower rebirths, so this is not a fantastical notion. My kittens could be anyone. Your pets could be anyone. They could have been really mean and obnoxious in their previous lives. If they had always been sweet, kind, moral, and wise, they would not (no offence!) have ended up as your pets.

Anger is such a weak mind. It can’t handle things. It can’t handle the truth. It is reactive, fearful, immature. Patience can handle anything. If we deal with our anger, far from being a pushover or doormat, we have a really strong, mature mind. We’re in charge. When we have patience, we have complete choice over how we’re viewing that person – for example, we are choosing to wish them freedom from delusions and suffering. This is an entirely positive, peaceful, and sane mind. Anger on the other hand is an insane reaction because it is deluded and its object does not exist. As it says in the definition, we’ve built up a mental image of an intrinsically faulty person – and where are mental images? Yup, only in our mind. As soon as the anger goes away, so does the intrinsically faulty person.

It’s one thing to understand this intellectually – if we put in the contemplation and the effort, though, Buddha’s advice can actually release us from one of our most crippling delusions. Now would be a good time.

By the way, if you haven’t yet, and even if you have, do pick up a copy of How to Solve our Human Problems ‘cos it’s jam-packed with good advice.

Over to you. Comments most welcome!