All lives are difficult; what makes some of them fulfilled as well is the manner in which pains have been met. Every pain is an indistinct signal that something is wrong, which may engender either a good or bad result depending on the sagacity and strength of mind of the sufferer. Anxiety may precipitate panic, or an accurate analysis of what is amiss. A sense of injustice may lead to murder, or to a ground-breaking work of economic theory. Envy may lead to bitterness, or to a decision to compete with a rival and the production of a masterpiece.

Anger is the ultimate destroyer of your own peace of mind

While contemplating the objects of the senses, attachment to them is born. From such attachment, intense desires arise. From unfulfilled desires, the seeds of anger appear. Ch.2 v.63 #110 krodhād bhavati saṁmohaḥ saṁmohāt smṛtivibhramaḥ smṛtibhraṁśād buddhināśo buddhināśāt praṇaśyati From unrestrained anger, delusion arises. From this delusion, memory is lost. When memory is lost, discernment is lost. When discernment is lost, this leads to harmful or destructive actions. Ch.2 v.64 #111

Anger, unlike fear or sadness, is a moral emotion. It is “righteous.” It aims not only to end the current trespass but to repair any damage done. It also aims to prevent further trespass by disarming, imprisoning, emasculating, or killing the trespasser.

As the anger, or the fear, within a personality builds, the world in which it lives increasingly reflects the anger, or the fear, that it must heal, so that eventually, ultimately, the personality will see that it is creating its own experiences and perceptions, that its righteous anger or justifiable fear originates within itself, and therefore can be replaced by other perceptions and experiences only through the force of its own being.

What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it. What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best, in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live.

Not caring about our own pain and the pain of others is not working. How much longer are we willing to keep pulling drowning people out of the river one by one, rather than walking to the headwaters of the river to find the source of the pain? What will it take for us to let go of that earned self-righteousness and travel together to the cradle of the pain that is throwing all of us in at such a rate that we couldn’t possibly save everyone? Pain is unrelenting. It will get our attention. Despite our attempts to drown it in addiction, to physically beat it out of one another, to suffocate it with success and material trappings, or to strangle it with our hate, pain will find a way to make itself known. Pain will subside only when we acknowledge it and care for it. Addressing it with love and compassion would take only a minuscule percentage of the energy it takes to fight it, but approaching pain head-on is terrifying. Most of us were not taught how to recognize pain, name it, and be with it. Our families and culture believed that the vulnerability that it takes to acknowledge pain was weakness, so we were taught anger, rage, and denial instead. But what we know now is that when we deny our emotion, it owns us. When we own our emotion, we can rebuild and find our way through the pain. Sometimes owning our pain and bearing witness to struggle means getting angry. When we deny ourselves the right to be angry, we deny our pain. There are a lot of coded shame messages in the rhetoric of “Why so hostile?” “Don’t get hysterical,” “I’m sensing so much anger!” and “Don’t take it so personally.” All of these responses are normally code for Your emotion or opinion is making me uncomfortable or Suck it up and stay quiet. One response to this is “Get angry and stay angry!” I haven’t seen that advice borne out in the research. What I’ve found is that, yes, we all have the right and need to feel and own our anger. It’s an important human experience.

So if you can look at all things without allowing pleasure to creep in - at a face, a bird, the colour of a sari, the beauty of a sheet of water shimmering in the sun, or anything that gives delight - if you can look at it without wanting the experience to be repeated, then there will be no pain, no fear, and therefore tremendous joy. It is the struggle to repeat and perpetuate pleasure which turns it into pain. Watch it in yourself. The very demand for the repetition of pleasure brings about pain, because it is not the same, as it was yesterday. You struggle to achieve the same delight, not only to your aesthetic sense but the same inward quality of the mind, and you are hurt and disappointed because it is denied to you.

when we are in pain and fear, anger and hate are our go-to emotions.

When desire dies,fear is born

Anger is a brief madness.

In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. Just as we are created anew by what we love, so we are reduced and unmade by what we hate.

Love is not a joy; it is a deep wonderful pain. It is a very deep, tearing, wonderful pain. Something within you should tear; not just something, everything within you should tear. Only then you know what love is. If it feels pleasant, that’s not love; it’s just convenience. Maybe you felt a little affection. If you have ever loved, everything inside you tears apart, really tears apart. It’s painful but wonderful. That’s how it is.

The punishment of desire is the agony of unfulfillment