Are external conditions making us angry?
After returning to India from a vacation in Vietnam, one of my friends found himself unbearingly disturbed by the pollution, overcrowded city life, and the nature of people in India. He was quite impressed with the clean Vietnamese roads, higher standards of living, humility of the population, and space to breathe. While traveling to the office on a jam-packed train, which he has been doing for many years without any complaints, he found all this pointless and wanted to leave India. He had lost his inner peace to anger towards the trash lying all around, the pungent smell of air, the arrogance of people, and so on.
The same routine and environmental conditions that were not so disturbing earlier have now afflicted anger & pain in him. What has changed? Also, thousands of people continue to be engaged in the same routine and encounter the same environmental conditions without anger, or even if it exists in some then not to the same degree. Are the external conditions muddling our peace? Are the phenomena around us causing us to be irritated and angry? If so, then why do we feel angry only sometimes, and why doesn’t everyone feel the same?
The seeds of anger already exist in our subconscious mind. Upon getting watered they manifest as mental formations in our conscious mind. These mental formations make us feel the attributes of anger and their subsequent reactions in our body and mind. The external stimuli to our senses are not acting as the water or the cause of these mental formations, although on the surface they might seem so. The internal stimuli to our mind in the form of thoughts are not the cause as well, rather anger gives rise to thoughts.
Undeveloped faculties of discrimination: The culprits behind anger
Any event that occurs outside will always have either of the two outcomes i.e. it has happened according to your desires/expectations or it has occurred against them. Similarly, a thought either flows according to your expectation or against it. Whenever the outcome is against your expectations, the potentiality is created to wet the seeds of anger and enable its growth. However, your intellect or the faculty of discrimination stands as a dam that prevents this water from germinating the seeds. If your intellect doesn’t know how to act as a dam then it has no control over the flow. Thus in its true essence, the intellect is watering the seeds, not the external/internal stimuli.
When in an unaware state, the faculty of discrimination mindlessly transmits all the sensory stimuli to Chitta (roughly translated as mind-matter), which in return reacts with anger non-invigilated. This is its default state and the most common state. In its aware state, it invigilates this process of sensory stimuli reaching Chitta, its reaction in return and mindfully raises the barrier that prevents further watering of the seeds. It doesn’t mean that the stimuli don’t reach your mind but its capability to produce mindless reactions is lost.
Almost all of us don’t have the slightest idea of how to make use of this functionality of our intellect. It’s not our fault as we have never been made aware of it nor been trained to use it this way. Our parents and our society have suffered from the strongholds of anger and its wrath and without any knowledge to handle it in a better way they have transferred the same knowledge to us. Our genes have these encrypted mental reactions of anger as inscribed and passed on by our ancestors. No doubt, the inability to use intellect to safeguard us against anger is the mind’s default and natural setting.
Empowering your intellect
To get out of this default setting and enable a vigilant intellect requires dedicated practice. Mindfulness & Yoga are powerful tools to achieve this feat. Through these techniques, awareness is established as an observer as opposed to a doer. Slowly and gradually, our minds are introduced to a subject that is not the victim but a witness. It is a process of introducing the mind to the eyes of our eyes, the ears of our ears, and so on. Naturally, our eyes are not conscious themselves, someone is witnessing through these eyes. The practice enhances the ability of our intellect to distinguish between the seer and the seen, the hearer and the heard, the thinker and the thought, etc.
With the empowered intellect you hear, see, feel, and get thoughts of an undesirable outcome but you would be able to distinguish the anger originating in the mind and your consciousness witnessing this phenomenon. This is an essential step in learning to embrace anger. This ability to distinguish is so powerful that your life could change with the onset of one such incident. By stepping out from an awareness that has been reacting all the time, you could now witness the entire act as an audience and laugh at the vagueness of the scene. It is like the thief who has been acting scrupulously undetected but loses all its power once noticed.
A clear discrimination of the component of anger as different from you at the moment of its action establishes an unprecedented ground to either reprimand it or accept it. The practice now has to be extended to learn to embrace it because reprimanding/ judging it is detrimental to your healing journey. It has to be accepted that this component may be unwholesome, ugly, or unwarranted but it is a part of you. These seeds have been gifted to you from your birth and you never had a say in accepting or rejecting them. All that can be done is to accept them with complete cognizance and move forward from there.
To understand why the seeds are gifted to us from our birth without our awareness, we have to step into the realms of the theory of Karma. The law of karma dictates the delivery of fruit of a certain kind at some instance for a former action. A past action that dealt with anger is responsible for arousing it again. The same law extends beyond one lifetime as well and thus all such anger-infused actions in one of your past lives are liable to stimulate anger in your present life at this present time. These past actions of anger in our past life or the present life are present in our subconscious in the form of seeds.
Accepting and learning to embrace anger: The genuine path to healing
Nevertheless, acceptance opens up the door for you to bring your mind under your control. When you begin to accept the component of anger as your part then you initiate a relationship with it which is based on compassion and kindness rather than on contempt and disdain. This happens through the practice of mindfulness. When something is a segment of you then you won’t reject it, would you? Automatically courage arouses in you to work and make it better.
You may establish a mother-son relationship with your anger. You view the acts of anger as an annoyed child who doesn’t have the wisdom of this world. It is ignorant and sometimes arrogant but still, it is your child. Whenever your intellect with its newfound capability detects this child’s irritation then the other part of your mind immediately establishes a connection to console it, begin a dialogue to calm it down and extend its support. You may share a laugh with it, a warm hug, an empathetic look, or even just a few moments of silence trying to understand it.
Embracing your anger initiates training your mind to break away from the loop of generating more karma of anger. Since you have stopped reacting to anger and upholding it with care and compassion, you provide a stable nurturing ground for it to rise. You also train your mind to welcome anger and make it a tool to facilitate the dissolution of more anger from your subconscious mind. When your conscious mind is not in a repulsive state, it acts as an opportunity for your subconscious mind to push some of the repressed anger to the front and thus get rid of it. When you learn to embrace it you unlock the power to control your mind and heal from within by tapping into the infinite source of calmness.
Calmness is the opposite state of anger. If anger is turbulent, restless, violent, and chaotic then calmness is smooth, relaxed, peaceful, and ordered. Calmness is the ability to feel still in your body and mind. Posing calm is easy but being truly calm from within is either a gift by nature or a result of dedicated practice for years. The beings who have found the source of immense calmness deep inside them lead their lives with bliss and spread tranquility around them. They are the true assets of humanity that raise their consciousness and the collective consciousness toward a peaceful and satisfied state of existence.
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