Q&A: Why am I angry all the time?
I was recently asked by a warrior at an advanced level of achievement, "Why am I angry all the time?" At first, I had to laugh - for it was a question I've asked myself a time or two in recent years. But even more than my own resonance with the inquiry, it occurred to me that this is a question I have heard MANY times from MANY warriors, and so it seemed appropriate to take a closer look at the machinations of anger, clarity & the warrior path.
What immediately comes to me is that warriors are, by nature, passionate people. Though a warrior may recognize that the world is full of folly, they tend to live by don Juan's admonition to "Play the game as if it matters." And, at times, it has been my observation that this can have the effect of creating a dichotomy of sorts in the mind/body/spirit of the warrior herself. If we know it is all folly, but we play the game as if it matters, there is a human tendency to get involved in the machinations of our own lives - whether job, family, friends, or entertainment. We can momentarily forget that it's all folly, and suddenly we find ourselves in the middle of an emotional reaction that seems real even though it has already been acknowledged as folly.
What to do?
For me, the key to coping with anger is awareness - not just the awareness of folly, but the awareness of my own relationship to that folly. Put another way, I stop and ask myself, "Why would this matter enough to waste energy getting pissed off?" Usually, it matters not in the least and then it's just a matter of releasing and reversing the automatic anger-response that kicks in when we momentarily forget that the nature of folly is simply to be folly.
But on a darker note, I have also concluded that clarity is the second enemy of a man of knowledge with good reason. The more clarity I have gained, the more pissed off I am at the world, while simultaneously having the ability to just laugh at the abject madness of it all. It has been said (though it may be just a program) that it is human nature to desire some sense of order. Maybe when I was a child, that sense of order seemed more cohesive than it does nowadays, but I am also inclined to think that the world has gotten worse, and that it is a trend that is not going to reverse itself anytime soon. Everywhere we turn, we are inundated with folly at its highest manifestation. We talk to robots on cell phones and wait on hold for hours while internet idjits stay up late figuring out ever-more-clever ways of stealing our identity or infecting our computers with some cyber virus that has the potential to destroy years of work... Well... don't get me started on THAT. (Look for the "rant" or "chaos theory" tags in my Live Journal entries if you want THAT little story dealing with The Sharp Edge of Anger...)
Point being... a warrior with awareness sees the world as it is and as it could be, perhaps even as it "should" be on a certain level of spiritual well-being, and the gap between what is and what might be is so severe that sometimes an anger response is somewhat "normal", all things considered. When we see that the world really is a nuthouse and the lunatics are running the asylum, it's sometimes difficult NOT to feel anger toward... what? The phantoms? The culture in which we live? All the blind, mad fools rushing headlong toward chaos?
At times when I have experienced that knee-jerk anger response, I try to stop myself and ask why it might matter to me - and often that's the key to releasing the anger, or at least coming to understand its origins. In the big picture, I know from my own experience that I have already attained one of the highest possible goals of a warrior. I have dreamed my double and now he is dreaming me. So what does it matter if some turkey cuts me off in traffic or I am misdiagnosed yet again by the medical profession or the roof leaks or the dog took a dump on the rug? So it becomes a matter of looking at myself in relation to the folly and coming to see that it really can't touch me on anything more than a surface level. Sure, it might destroy my world, kill everyone I love, even take my own life from me... but in the bigger picture, even that is only the dark manifestation of folly.
I've also discovered that when it is impossible for whatever reason to release our anger, the best thing we can do (both emotionally & spiritually) is channel it into something that does advance our path. I've talked about the power howl from time to time, and that's just one way I can re-direct my anger when I momentarily lose track of the fact that it's all just folly. I have a friend who does her best writing when she's angry at the world, and another who says she has the cleanest house on the block when her anger gets the better of her. So... in addition to having awareness of the folly, learning to redirect can be a powerful tool for also letting it all go.
As a companion thread to this one, I would recommend "Directing the Dark Side."
In the big picture, it's all a choice. We can choose to be angry or we can chose to laugh at ourselves for the funny, naked monkeys we really are.
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