This is something that I wrote regarding anger. Recently I've realized that What I wrote has much to do with Eastern Philosophy. I have only a passing knowledge of Buddhism and Eastern Philosophy. I know this is a lot of writing, and I do not expect many people or possibly anyone to read this, but I would be overjoyed if some one read this and commented on it, especially from a Buddhist perspective. Anger comes from a loss of control. All feelings of anger people get boil down to feeling like or know that they don't have control of a situation. Sometimes people get angry because they don't understand why a situation is happening or why someone is doing something, but this too boils down to wanting to change a situation but not understanding it, thus not being able to control it. I will go into more detail about that, just keep it in mind. So as I said, Anger comes from a feeling of losing control. Here are some examples. * You trip on a rock after a bad day, and get angry and start yelling, either at the rock, or God, or just plain everything. --You do not have the ability to go back in time and make the unpleasant experience of tripping on the rock not happen. Nor do you have control (or feel you have control) over the bad day you had. * You are speeding way over the speed limit, and you get angry when you get pulled over. --You may try to justify your anger, saying that cops are stupid, or you had to go fast for whatever reason, and maybe your anger is justified. But the anger comes from not having control over getting pulled over, having to wait, getting a ticket, and maybe being embarrassed, and whatever else is unpleasant that you don't have control over. * Some random person you don't know says you are ugly and fat and whatever else. --Maybe you can justify your anger because the person was mean. But you are actually angry because well a number of possible reasons that lead back to a feeling of not control. Maybe deep inside you think you are everything they said, if you got angry in that case it might be because you feel like you are insecure about your looks and don't have control over how you look (or not enough) Or maybe you are not insecure, and the random person was a ten year old. Most people wouldn't get mad, but suppose you did. Maybe you are mad that the kids parents didn't raise him better, or if its not a kid, that they would say something so mean (even if you know its not true) to a stranger. Either way,you want them to be nicer but cant control them or their parents or how they think, or their past to make them nicer. * A friend insults you. -- You don't believe the insult, but maybe you don't understand why they said it. as I said in the beginning, "Sometimes people get angry because they don't understand why a situation is happening or why someone is doing something, but this too boils down to wanting to change a situation but not understanding it, thus not being able to control it."In this case, you probably don't want to "control" what your friend thinks in the way we normally think of the word control. But you might be hurt that they would say something. Or you don't understand why they said it. In the end you probably want your friend to agree with you on their own, and you don't want to force them to agree, you want them to do it on their own free will. Obviously you don't have a lot of control over that and it can be frustrating. OK, so up until now I've just tried to show that one way to look at anger is that it comes a from a loss of control. If I haven't convinced you of that, or you don't think the concept makes sense, don't read on because you wont get what I'm trying to say. Email me with why you think it doesn't come from a lack of control. Please I want to stress to you not to make a decision about what I've said at all until you have at least read the whole thing. When you get angry, you are actually getting frustrated with yourself, for not being able to control whatever it is you want to control. First, I want to say that By "control" I don't mean everyone is a "control freak" in the way we normally think of, but rather people naturally have a desire for the world world to work in a way that is pleasant to them. This isn't necessarily a bad things, its just part of humans. We want to world to be nice to us. Generally we think of other things making us angry. The rock was in our way, thus causing us to be angered. The person shot our dog, rear ended us, shot a spit wad at us, said we smell like used toilet paper, or fired us from our job. Maybe we are mad because we were going to go play soccer but it starts raining, or we are mad because a flood came and destroyed our house and killed everyone in our family. Now, I'm not saying its stupid to get angry, life sometimes sucks, and humans deal with our problems and stress by expressing out emotions. Getting angry at the rock you just tripped on is a natural mechanism humans have to relieve stress. SO perhaps you are thinking.. "Thats stupid, I'm not frustrated at myself, it was that guy who cut me off that I'm mad at." But what you actually mean is that you are projecting your frustration onto the most logical thing you can think of to project it onto: the guy who cut you off". You are projecting that frustration onto him in the form of anger, or expressing it to him as anger. This is how humans naturally relieve their stress. It works pretty good too. Its incredibly important not to hold in your emotions, you'll fuck yourself up (I did). But there are different ways of expressing your frustration. First id like to give an example to help show you that you are in fact frustrated with your general inability to stop something from happening, or make something happen. Its true that people do stupid things and that could make us angry. But I can basically prove thats not why you get angry. Suppose someone hits you and you get angry. Question #1 Are you mad because that person tried to hit you, and they shouldn't be such and asshole? Question #2 Or are you mad because you didn't have control over the uncomfortable experience of getting punched. Well lets slightly alter the scenario, so the first question is still true, but the second isn't. Supposed the person tries to hit you but misses. Are you still angry? In most cases you wouldn't be and if you are its because of a different reason. For example, if your close friend is trying to hit you, you might be frustrated because you thought they wouldn't want to hurt you. Now you might say "SEE! there, In that scenario I got mad because my friend tried to hurt me!" But if you look deeper its because your friend tried to hurt you, you don't want him or her to hurt you, or want to hurt you, so you are angry either because you cant stop them from wanting to hurt you, or you don't understand why they would want to, and thus cant stop them from wanting you, or bother of those reasons, or some other. The possibilities are endless but as far as I can tell it comes down to feeling helpless to stop an event or thing from occurring, be it an emotion, a physical pain or anything else. If that does not work to help you understand then imagine everything that you've ever gotten angry at. Some things you get mad at are inanimate, or not alive. They don't think, and don't have morals or a conscience. Such as if you trip on a rock or their is a flood that kills your family. You can get just as mad at those things as you do people. This next example might confuse you... Pretend that everyone besides you is actually a very complex android (smart robot), that is programmed to react to you in exactly the way that they do. Every time someone cuts you off, or dumps you or anything else, they are just following a programming course that determines their every move. Its not logical for you to get mad at them and yet you do. That's how it is when we get mad when a friend or family member dies, or we trip and fall down or we get cancer. It doesn't matter if the thing that causes our self frustration is a person who should know better, or a rock sitting on the ground. We give zillions of reasons for each different scenario, but it actually just boils down to the fact that we cant change it. If we had the ability to stop whatever bad thing happened from occurring, we wouldn't be angry.
One last comment: When something shocks you, you react naturally, and your adrenaline rises. If you see a car speeding right at you, or someone splashes you with a bucket of cold water. This is the "fight or flight" response, and is not anger, although it is often combined with anger. These things don't always illicit a negative response. You catch a football in the middle of a football game for example, or you read your lottery ticket and realize you just won 90 million dollars (minus 40 million in taxes etc). During times were you are shocked you may also become angry, but its two separate things happening nearly simultaneously.
correct. your emotions have nothing to do with anything or anyone but yourself. "Our life is shaped by our mind - for we become what we think."
Good point. I think I understand your meaning. I'm new to all of this so please correct anything that is wrong or you disagree with. Anger does not come from a lack of control. That is a mistake to say, because its placing the blame of the anger on the fact that you had a lack of control. In reality it is entirely up to you where you let your ego get angry, or you recognize your ego for what it is, and not get angry. Is that what you mean? And if so I think that most of what i wrote still is truthful as long as I edit a little. Basically, where ever i wrote that it came from a lack of control, change it to say it comes from your ego, our mind, we believe our anger into existence. looking forward to your response.
Oh, heh. I thought your post started off with "correction" which really made me reread your statement, and then respond with the post that i responded with.
As my husband said one day when I was getting reallllllllly pissed off (to the point that women with PMS were avoiding me Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!) "You can't control the events around you. You can only control how you're going to respond to them."
all good bro Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! you were correct when you said anger is spawned when we feel were not in control. this is the ego at work. the ego comes from conditioning ourselves to believe that we are seperate from everything and everyone around us and in turn acting selfishly and then becoming angry when things dont go the way we want them too. Anger is the sickness. Patience is the cure.
Although sometimes a .45 automatic makes a good placebo...jkPlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
"the ego comes from conditioning ourselves to believe that we are seperate from everything and everyone around us and in turn acting selfishly and then becoming angry when things dont go the way we want them too." I kind of understand this but not entirely. Can you explain how or why we are not separate from those around us?
i cant give a definitive answer to that question. seriously, thats a question that has been asked for thousands of years and is up there with the deepest questions known to man. ive been sitting here for like 30 mins trying to word what i want to say but its hard. our pure minds, removed of all defilements (anger, lust, the notion of 'I') are excactly the same, indistingushable from one another. its only our experiences and circumstances that have shaped us into something else. Our minds, all minds, are connected to each other because all minds came from the same place and are all connected to the laws of life. (i.e. "Hate can never dispel hate, only love can dispel hate.") I dunno, it really difficult to explain. Hopefully you get what im trying to say which is more important than the words themselves. This is based on my beliefs though which may differ from yours. I could be here for another half hour and still not write excactly what i want to say so this will have to do. Let me know what you think. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
hey sauna correct me if im wrong on this but are you, in essence, trying to say that its the thought of having control that is the true seed of your anger? just want to know if im understanding correctly. thanks.
I asked the question about how we are all not separate from each other and a person answered with the following: -------------------- "There is no place where "I" stop and "You" start. Reality is radically subjective, but no one owns, or dictates it. We exist totally all the time in a state of "alwaysness". No beginning, no end, no separation. It's a oneness, but not a singular state, oneness as a total or complete state. Perfection really. So let's take a linear example of that. A sheet of paper. A sheet of paper has many conditions, but no cause. It never began, and it will never end. One of the many conditions of the sheet of paper is the tree it came from, another would be the parents of the man or woman who cut down that tree, another is the food the man or woman who works in the paper mill ate for lunch, etc. The list of conditions is endless and also has no beginning or end. Suppose you held up that sheet of paper, then set fire to it? It never came from anywhere, so it's not going anywhere. The paper burns and changes into many things, heat, ash, smoke, etc. But it merely changes, it does not cease to exist. The heat from the fire goes into the air, the ash to the ground, the sheet of paper still exists in those conditions. Next time it rains, the heat in the air will have changed and be reunited with the ash in the soil and so on. So in the sense that the only thing that changed about the sheet of paper was our notion of it, it was never not there, and it never went anywhere. The ego is like this. The ego a set of notions that results in "I", "Me" and "Mine". All of those positions allow us to navigate duality in a linear sense, but they're not Reality. They're just an interface, or set of tools, they're not what we are. In Reality, there is no separation between a "Me" and a "You", those are just notions like the sheet of paper. So we are not separate at all, we're the same conditions from the same source in various forms of manifestation. We were never not here, and we are never going anywhere. We simply change according to conditions."
If anyone has anything to add to that, it would be wonderful. Also, if someone is willing to discuss duality, that too would be wonderful. I'm going to look on google for duality and read up on it on my own as well.
re: the bold writing. i agree with this. something that exsists can never not exsist. it cant just disappear into thin air. this is why i believe that the mind carries on after the expiration of the body and that our time here must be spent wisely.
Not quite. I rather take issue with this: The authentic version of Buddhism is rather the opposite: Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. In other words, we shape our own experience. We set ourselves up for the anger. Situations are routinely induced that were only to be expected but then complained about anyway. The presupposition that we are shaped is rather warned against: "He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me." Those who harbor such thoughts do not still their hatred. He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me." Those who do not harbor such thoughts still their hatred. It is about the illusion of not being in control when in fact there was nobody else to blame anyway, or nobody at least with such a need to be blamed.
yeah i get excactly what your saying. but i was refering to the causes of the illusion of seperateness though. when i say "us" im not specificlly meaning our minds, i mean our society, class systems, behaviour, the things that lead to the illusion of the seperate ego. maybe i should have said "its only our experiences and circumstaces that make us believe we are different from the next person" or something. what do you think? keen to discuss. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
anger starts with bieng unsatysfied with something, if you dislike something it will turn into frustration witch will turn into annoyance wich will then turn into frustration witch will turn into anger wich will turn into hatred, the trail can vary depending on who is experiencing the feelings. alot of anger can come from fear, and also bieng insecure, learn to accept death as a part of life. then go from there and you will find your own way, never bottle things up inside vent your emtions in a productive way that does not inflict self harm or harm onto others, read the dhali lhamas works he will help you on this quest to ridding hate and anger from your mind, it is a long and difficult path to follow, but it brings great rewards to those who finally understand how to change and follow the path of zen. peace,
