Personally, I think anger or rage, whatever you want to call it, you know it, you've felt it, I've felt it. That one emotion that makes your face go
red, it makes your vision blur, it makes you see blood. Let's call it anger. I think it's wasted energy. From anger springs forth apathy, grief, fear,
hatred, shame, blame, regret, resentment, and hostility. None of this
[snip] does you any good. It may fuel your fire for a while, maybe get
you through a tough time, it may help you smash a record in the gym, but it won't last. It's like putting nitrous in your car, it's good for a burst,
but it won't sustain you. The fuel that sustains you on your journey needs to come from within you, deep down, not from some external source. The fuel
I'm talking about is like the deep, calm waters at the bottom of a lake. Anger is like the choppy, wavy, wind blown surface.
I mentioned awareness and self-observation in another post. Have you ever once questioned why you got angry? What exactly about whatever happened made
you so irritable? Instead of blindly accepting anger as a part of you, have you ever observed it? Just looked at it? Questioned it?
Maybe the anger isn't real. What do I mean by this? I mean, the anger is inside of you and not in reality. It's like this. Let's say you're driving to
work and someone cuts you off and get angry. If your anger is as real and as solid as you believe it to be that means I could pick any other person
and place them into that exact same situation and they would become angry. But that's not the case. Some people wouldn't give two hoots if someone cut
them off, someone might completely blow up, full on road rage. You see?
Where does anger come from or any other negative emotion for that matter. I'm talking about even the slightest bit of irritation. There was this guy
at my work and for some reason he got on some people's nerves, he's just the kind of guy something about him bugged you or whatever. You know what I
mean. I mean these people really let him get to them and upset their mood and sh*t. But, the truth is, he doesn't disturb you, you disturb him.
There's an old Chinese saying that I remember reading, can't find it right now, but it goes like this, "You are trying to study. You live in a crowded
city. A baby begins to cry next door and now you are having trouble studying. A few more moments go by and this baby won't quiet down and now, your
not just having trouble studying, but it's really starting to irritate you, kind of
[snip] you off. "
[snip] baby," Stupid
[snip]
you say. You disturb the noise, the noise doesn't disturb you, like we think it does. I could place someone else in that same exact position and they
wouldn't get irritated.
So where does that irritation come from? It comes from within you. It comes from your inflated sense of self. Your inflated ego. For some reason we
think the universe owes us something. We think we deserve something. This is where all the trouble starts, we think we're special, we think we're
important. You need to knock yourself down a notch and look at the big picture. The universe doesn't care about you. It doesn't give two sh*ts if you
live or die. A hungry bear wouldn't think twice about eating you for breakfast. The universe is indifferent. To the universe you are less than a grain
of sand. You are to the universe as a cell is to you in your body. Do you mourn for all the cells that die every second to sustain you as an organism?
No, you don't. You don't care about that little skin cell or that one little white blood cell, you don't name them, "Oh there goes Billy, fighting my
infection I have." In the same way, the universe doesn't care about you.
You can't lose sight of this perspective. I think anger and irritableness comes from the belief that the universe owes us something, that somehow
we're special and important, when really, we're no more than dust in the wind.