Suppose some guy is having a go at you. Any minute now you
know you are going to start getting angry. This is the moment you need
awareness.
You need to train in awareness in advance so you can call
upon it in this crucial moment. To train in awareness you meditate on the
activity going on in your own mind. You simply sit and notice what is arising.
Think of your mind as the sky and the thoughts and feelings
as passing clouds. You don’t engage with the thoughts, don’t follow the
feelings. You simply see them arise and then watch them dissolve again. You
become a silent observer of what is going on in your mind.
Training in this way, you can notice when anger is about to
develop in your mind. It allows you to pause, if only for a second or two, just
enough to step back and avoid automatic retaliation.
Then, in that moment, you need to do something
counter-intuitive, but which is the key to freedom – you accept. Accept a
moment’s mental discomfort. Exercise a moment’s patient acceptance of the pain
or unpleasantness you are experiencing.
Why should I? Well, because the law of karma tells us that
all the suffering we experience is caused by our past actions. The guy having a
go at you is just a secondary cause, a trigger. Ultimately, somehow, in some
way long forgotten, you brought this upon yourself.
If you can accept that (or even if you can’t) but you can
patiently endure a minute of unpleasant feelings, you pacify that karma. It is burnt
off, exhausted, dealt with – and you will never have to face it again.
In this moment’s pause you recall all the disadvantages of
getting angry. Anger is a completely destructive force. It serves no positive
purpose. Its sole function is to harm us, destroying our peace of mind. Worse
still it causes us to act in unhelpful ways which sow the seeds of even more suffering
in the future.
Anger, if followed, reinforces our self cherishing, the
source of all our suffering and the medium through which we experience all our
suffering. Even in its milder forms of irritation, annoyance, frustration or
resentment, it disturbs our mind, destroying any chance of peace and happiness.
In this moment’s pause, you also give yourself a chance to
reflect that this guy is not an inherently bad person. In fact it’s not he who
is at fault at all. He is in the grip of his delusions. They are what’s causing
him to act in this negative way towards you.
If you are going to get angry with anything, get angry with
delusions. (Actually this is not anger at all – to take up arms against
delusions is actually a form of wisdom.) It’s this guy’s self-grasping, his
self-cherishing, his pride, jealousy or attachment that is driving him to act
in this way.
And d’you know what? We all have these delusions. We all
suffer from them to some extent or another. We’re all in the same boat. All wanting
to be happy, but plagued by delusions which compel us to do negative things that
just make matters worse. In this we are all equal. We’ve all been there… so cut
him some slack.
By this time, the moment will have passed. You will have
avoided retaliating and escalating the situation. You’ll both have had a chance
to cool off and avoid making matters worse.
Then later, perhaps while meditating, you can think, ‘that poor
guy’. This guy who was having a go at me was totally under the control of his
delusions. And acting on his anger like that was just sowing the seeds of more
suffering in the future. It isn’t condescending to think like this, it’s pure
compassion. And thinking compassionately is a very virtuous and beneficial
thing to do, for yourself as well as him.
You can then go on and think ‘I wish he didn’t have to do
this. I wish he didn’t have to suffer these delusions. I wish there was
something I could do to help him. I wish I could take that suffering away from
him.’
There is a wonderful meditation you can do in which you imagine
that you take away this guy’s delusion and the suffering it causes him. You
imagine it in the form of black smoke and you draw it from him into your heart.
You imagine that this relieves him of his suffering. It does no harm to you. It
is a very virtuous wish and is of great benefit to yourself.
You can also go on to imagine that you can replace that
delusion with love and happiness. You pretend you are beaming love and peace
into his heart. Practising in this way creates the causes for us to eventually
develop the ability to actually do this.
Next time you encounter him, you wish him to be happy. Just
think how that could change the dynamic between you. He’s not likely to get
angry with you if your intention is for him to be happy.
You will have transformed a potential angry conflict into a
harmonious and positive relationship. And that’s how to not get angry.
