The final nail in the coffin – Your struggle with anger ends today!
Here is everything you need to escape from the anger of becoming.
Verily, no one likes anger, the evil which enters our body along with five other allies at birth; and no one is perennially angry because it is not man’s intrinsic nature. That means we have the reassurance that anger, which is an incidental effect, can be reduced or even eliminated by uprooting the cause.
If you are serious about ending the struggle with your anger, you should be asking this question every time you get angry -why am I getting angry; what inside me is working its way through, before I retort angrily to a situation of the outside world? The probability of getting an answer is perhaps close to zero because the root cause of your anger is ignorance, which is neither bliss nor lack of knowledge, but lack of correct knowledge. Ignorance of this class is difficult to imagine because it is greater than all the effects it produces. It not only shrouds the grave repercussions anger causes but sanctions repeated engagement in impious acts as a necessary evil. Since interpretation of ignorance is more difficult than analyzing darkness, people divert their energies to get rid of the effects instead of eliminating the cause.
Blaming science for not fixing our struggle with anger is extended ignorance, for anger is a personality issue belonging to the subjective world, which denies access to physical science. Science does what it is best at, but it is vaulted by its own limitations. Using state of the art devices, it scans the middle state of things to unravel fascinating anatomical mystery of man, but leaves his emotional experiences unattended as they do not belong to the realm of the scientific world and hence not available for analysis.
Yet in its noble attempt to serve mankind, medical science explains the process of getting angry as follows: When someone is experiencing and expressing anger, he or she is not using the thinking (cortex) part, but the limbic centre of the brain. Inside the limbic system there is a small structure called the amygdala, which is like the warehouse for storing all emotional memories. The information from the outside world passes through the amygdala, where the decision is made whether or not to send it to the cortex area of the brain for processing. If the incoming information triggers enough of emotional charge, the amygdala can override the cortex and send the information to the limbic system, causing the person to react to an incident or information, without regard to the consequences.
The medical world has also issued statements of facts linking chronic anger to serious health issues, such as high blood pressure, skin disorders, and digestion problems. And in that list, what gazes fiercely among others was reported by Debbie Strong in her article ‘7 Ways anger is ruining your health’, in which she quotes Chris Aiken, MD at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Winston Salem, North Carolina, who said “in the two hours after an angry outburst, the chance of having a heart attack doubles”. While acknowledging this significant information, we must know exactly what the fundamental cause of the emotional trigger is.
“It would have taken less than a second to create the word ‘anger’ for it simply required dropping the first letter from its mother-Danger. The intention must have been to warn the man of the impending danger of getting angry” a wise man once said. Yet we all get mad at the most trivial issue, even though we are aware of the negative impact it has on physical, mental, and social levels.
The philosophy of Vedanta dating back to 700 BCE, declares man’s desire to seek happiness from every relationship and everything he does as the secondary cause, sitting in the middle of the cause and effect ladder, and traces ignorance as the ultimate cause resting at the lowest rung. We may all experience happiness for extended periods, but no one is exempt from experiencing unhappiness, which is caused by the incorrect understanding of the individual’s self adequacy. Not realizing that unhappiness is the problem of our mind, which needs to be resolved internally, the man endlessly struggles to fix it with external sources.
Desire and anger are like the two sides of a coin. They are the consequences of feeling incomplete that arises due to the ignorance of your real self; and identification with the body and mind, your false self. Experiencing inadequacy is natural when you look upon yourself as a finite individual inside the huge universe, which consists of other individuals bestowed with greater fortunes. Until you discover your real self, your desire will keep growing even as you keep fulfilling it, like the fire which keeps increasing as you keep feeding it. The desire to discover happiness drives the man to engage in various activities with the end goal of becoming self sufficient. He becomes anxious as he suffers from the expectation of a favorable outcome from every action. And when it fails to produce the desired result, it creates frustration, anger and the need to fulfill a new desire. A fulfilled desire on the other hand creates greed. Thus when the mind of a person is all the time preoccupied with thoughts of fulfilling desires, he has no time to ask the basic question, why he gets angry. He is caught in a vicious circle, which deludes his intellect and turns a pious man into a violent human.
Demonstration of anger is not a deliberately planned action but a reaction of the conscious mind to an incident or a situation. Generally, anger is prominent in people, who seem unsettled in the middle of the two worlds, either worrying about the distant and the recent past or anxious about the future. In the run-up to the man losing his temper, many things happen. But it’s mainly the interference of vasnas-which are acrimonious impressions one forms during the first and subsequent interfaces with the objects or persons of the world outside. The ‘likes and dislikes’ one develops for people and objects also play a crucial role in triggering anger and other negative emotions.
At the base of the building block inside our mind though, is the matrix of our subtle being, which consists of three energy propensities known as the SRT Factors. It can be understood as the three diverse forces designed to complement each other for determining our personality. ‘S’ represents purity and peace. ‘R’ expresses itself in action and violence, while ‘T’ is characterized by resistance and inertia. The energy factor working as an independent entity or in combination with one more factor is responsible for the formation of vasnas, our thoughts, actions, the compulsion to defend our actions, habits, and finally our character.
SRT is also the metaphysical cause for the modifications man undergoes at the physical level and his constantly changing behavior. While everyone is endowed with the three energy propensities fondly called gunas, the configuration varies from person to person and the state of man’s mind depends on which factor dominates his personality at the core and floating levels. For example, while everyone must become angry with oneself before getting mad at an object or at someone outside, the person who is ‘R’ dominated becomes angry faster.
Unhappiness expresses itself as anger in a person who is ‘R’ dominant coupled with ego; it pushes the person with dominant ‘T’ deeper into the negative territory. The rare ones with dominant ‘S’, do not engage in action for fulfillment of any desire. Hence they do not get easily agitated.
How can man defeat the enemy, when giving up desires is next to impossible? It requires realigning the personality. It involves converting your legitimate desires into non-binding preferences and managing SRT, by controlling the bases that provide support to the enemy:
Five sense organs (Eyes, nose, ears, skin and tongue) that introduce mesmerizing sense objects to our mind.
Mind: The recording faculty which forms vasnas that afflict our intellect.
Intellect which suffers from delusion due to attachment.
Together, they make you dependent on the external world to seek happiness, when in reality the external world is neither a source of joy nor sorrow.
Your body-mind complex, which depends on your consciousness for life, is an incidental reality meant only for carrying out transactions. This realization is the final nail in the coffin with anger inside, breathing its last. The struggle with your anger will end when you discover the changeless, infinite ‘Consciousness’ with independent existence as your intrinsic reality, in which all desires arise and all desires are fulfilled.
This knowledge will bring direct benefit at the intellectual level, and resolve the problems at the emotional level as corollaries. You will realize that a new desire cannot relieve the misery of the unfulfilled desires of the past; thereafter you will perform all actions as a fulfilled person and not for fulfilling any desires. You will be free from all expectations. Anger will dissipate and you will remain calm in the presence or the absence of anything in life.
When the greatest pleasures of life known to man become superfluous, why would you be troubled by the worst fall or thrilled by the greatest triumph in life?
