Every single moment of your life you are given a choice. Even in prison, where your choices and decisions are severely limited, it's up to you to decide whether or not you will act in anger or in compassionate understanding. You are not doomed to keep repeating your past mistakes over and over again if this is not your choice. You can decide to take the steps to change your anger into understanding. This is an understanding of you; a deep look at what makes you tick, what your triggers are; and how much suffering you've created for yourself and others. But be warned, what you find may not be pretty. In fact, it may be damned ugly, but within that ugliness there is also understanding, acceptance and beauty, IF you're willing to face it.
To be free of anger, especially in our environment, is not an easy task. We only need to open our eyes every morning to see the cycle of suffering that anger creates; how hate and anger lead to revenge and how revenge leads to more hate... and how the cycle goes on and on, endlessly.
So what can we do to change this, to end this cycle?
First, we must recognize what anger is. Anger is a rejection of life being a particular way at a particular moment; it's displeasure with the current conditions of life. But anger is not a solid emotional entity; it has components. These components are the ingredients that flavor anger.
What are they? They are our reactions, discriminations and our petty annoyances. But take the pronoun our out of the previous sentence and put the word my in its place. MY reactions, my discriminations, my petty annoyances. These flavor my anger into irritation, frustration, rage, hate, bitterness, sadness, cynicism, impatience, guilt, and judgement. "I don't like... my situation, how the world is, the guy next to me, the staff, the food, the blankets, the bed, myself, ....blah, blah, blah" This is the beginning of anger. It's our resistence to the present moment and its conditions. This is where we begin to tighten our mind against the current reality and try to push it away (or wish it away) and fail. In our mind, this is the point at which our perceptions and experiences are created and where our attitude affects what we say and do.
Second, when anger is recognized for what it really is, we open ourselves up to the ability to use it as a means to challenge our level of spiritual cultivation rather than as a means to perpetuate more suffering. And in that opening we are also given the opportunity to observe how our mind works (how we create and feed anger) and how we relate to the world through its fogged lens.
In doing this it is important to understand that we are in an unpleasant environment which, for the most part, cannot be changed. The sooner the resistence to this is abandoned, the sooner we will be able to dig deep inside ourselves and find the real root causes of our anger. If we cannot abandon this, then we end up living in a fantasy world of how things "should be." And there we are, angry, pissed off, and suffering because "life sucks" and doesn't conform to our fantasy.
We might also launch ourselves off into the idea of "controlling anger" , or "managing anger". The Georgia penal system even has an "anger management class" (which fails miserably). But we run into a problem with this, and the problem is that all controls have a limit, once the limit is exceeded then the control fails. To truly overcome anger, it cannot be controlled or managed, those are quick fixes, it can only be faced head-on and eliminated.
Each moment you spend angry only imprints anger further into your mind, making it easier and easier to become angry again. Like a kid with a bicycle, the more he rides it the easier it becomes. Under constant repetition anger becomes the norm. We find less and less to like about ourselves, our situation and about others. We become increasingly irritable and negative and those we considered friends begin to avoid us, adding loneliness and a feeling of isolation to feed our anger. Then shit keeps happening,( the world is against us) and we fail to understand that these outlooks are the result of our own doing. This is why it is so important to reflect on our own responsibility for the situation we are in. I'm not talking about guilt or innocence, nor about freedom or incarceration. It's about the "situation" of life; it's about finding life's real beauty and its quite peace.
Third, you really have to want that beauty and peace. If this is just some "lame idea" to you, an abstract concept that "doesn't conform to realty", then you're wasting your time reading this. To find that beauty and peace you have to make the firm decision not to indulge in anger. You'll stumble and fall, but without that firm resolve you'll just be inventing excuses about why your anger is justified.
But once you do make that firm decision, things will change for you. It's going to make you pause and really see the tendencies within you that make you angry. And once you're able to see them, you'll be better able to resist them instead of being controlled by them.
Fourth. I sit on my cushion and take a deep breath and take a good long deep look at myself. What do I see?
I see very little happiness. I see many hopes, many wishes, a lot of dread, resentment and self-criticism. I see that I want to make things better for myself and others. I see that all of this is, in one form or another, a desire for things to be different than they really are. I want, I desire, I wish, I yearn and all of it just brings me suffering. And then I'm damned angry because I feel that lack about how wonderful my life "could be" if things would just conform to my goddamned wishes! If things had just gone as planned! ( Does any of this sound familiar?)
Unfortunately, life is what it is at this moment. All my wishing does not stop the people I care about from getting beaten, robbed, raped or murdered. It does not stop the war, it does not stop kids from starving to death, it does not stop disease. The only thing I can change is how I react. Wanting to harm the source of my suffering does nothing but continue the cycle of suffering.( It's just another misplaced desire.) Trying to move around the pain does nothing either, you can't avoid what's inside your head. You have to face it eventually.
And that's what should strike you when you really sit and take a look at all this crap in your head. All these desires are nothing but mental fabrications, thoughts that I have produced and labeled which skew the way I look at, and react to, the world around me.
Reality is often something that I want to keep at bay, it says that eventually everything that I love and cherish inside and outside these walls will get sick, grow old and die. It says that the system is atrocious; riddled with drugs, violence and gangs; that I have fucked up my life and caused much suffering to myself and others.
It's useless for me to cling to my wish that things were different because they are not. It is time to put the past down, accept my losses and face the future in the light of my previous actions. But I must do this without self pity, without sadness. I can no longer allow my strength to be eroded by things I cannot change. I must surrender myself to the reality of the present situation, and in surrendering without any judgements of good or bad, I find, ironically, relief. I don't have to struggle anymore. I can just sit and accept the fact that this is life at the moment. And I can move to the next moment, and the next, and so on. And without realizing it, I'm suddenly living. I can suddenly see that without the fogged lens of anger distorting my vision that there are places where I can make a difference, even if it's only a small one, to change the suffering around me.
Even in prison there is life. You can live it, or you can burn out in the fires of your own rage. This is your choice from moment to moment. And I know this sounds like a bunch of weak shit, but what have you got to lose? Sit down and take a deep long look at yourself, look at what's in your head. Is that really how you want to spend the rest of your life? If not, take a look further into this issue, the whole thing is about anger, which the Buddha himself taught people how to overcome.
** A large part of this article was taken from "In this World, Hate Never Yet Dispelled Hate", by Sarah Doering as it appeared in the Insight Journal, Fall 2004. All rights reserved.
