2009-12-06 · Day Retreat, London Insight 2009 · 1h 03m
Working with Anger and Aversion (Part Two)
Transcript
Reading view
Okay, so let's go a little bit deeper into this question, this difficulty of anger and aversion, particularly looking more in detail at ways we can work with this energy skilfully, wisely. For us as insight meditators, our primary base, if you like, is mindfulness, and the capacity of the mind to meet experience in an open, curious presence of attention. And that is, again, what can be so helpful when anger and aversion are around -- so helpful, so skilful.
So what would that look like? Something's happened, someone has said something to me, someone has done something, not said something, not done something, whatever. And there's anger. And I find myself angry. Typically that experience of anger is quite, again, quite a complex experience. It's not just one thing. There's quite a lot going on when we're churned up with anger. There's quite a lot going on. And so we might hopefully carve out some time to sit, to be with it, to go into it. Well, what happens: I sit down, I open to the experience, I pay attention to the experience and the textures that make up anger, and I see there are different aspects. Oftentimes when there's anger, there's a story with it: "She said this. How could she say that? Why did ...? What about this? I did this. They didn't know that I ...", etc.
Some of that can be very justified and important. And it's not that the story -- too many double negatives! The story has a place in investigation, in Dharma. But using mindfulness, actually, the first kind of way we investigate is letting the story be there, but not getting too hooked into it. So the story will tend to have a kind of magnetic power, that we just get pulled into that kind of vortex up there, up in the mind. It goes round and round, and what we're going to do, and what we're going to say, and the past and the future, etc., and the agitation of that, and in a way, the kind of repetition of that. Story just tends to go round and round.
When something goes round and round, you know that it's not really leading to freedom. It's just what we call saṃsāra. So letting the story be there, but actually putting most of the attention into the body, and the bodily experience, the bodily manifestation and expression of anger. What does it feel like in the body? Not feeding the story too much by getting hooked into it and giving it our attention. As I put my attention on the body, I start to notice the sensations of anger. And it's a difficult experience, anger. It's not an easy bodily experience. There's heat, there's pressure, there's agitation, there's turbulence inside. It's not an easy thing to be with on a bodily level.
And what we find is, as we try and do that, we keep getting sucked into this whirlpool, this vortex of the story. It's okay. Not trying to ignore the story. I'm not trying to get rid of it. I'm just acknowledging that it's there, but I'm putting most of the energy of my attention onto the bodily experience, the opening to the bodily experience, and allowing the bodily experience of anger.
And 'allow' is a really important word. It's a really, really crucial word. Sometimes we talk about mindfulness, but again, mindfulness, one word, has a lot of different shadings. Can it be that I'm feeling the feelings in the body, the sensations in the body, and the stance of mindfulness is just like this, like the hands holding something, like it would hold a bird, a little bird, or anything else? It's holding those sensations and allowing them, allowing them to be there, allowing them to churn away and manifest.
If I can do that, and it's a practice, but if I can cultivate that practice, and work on it, slowly, slowly, as I'm with the anger, the sensations of the anger, it's almost like this allowing and this presence, the very kindness that's wrapped up in the allowing mindfulness allows quieter feelings that are, so to speak, underneath the anger, underneath the frothy surface, the bubbling heat of the ocean, underneath, will begin to reveal themselves -- not always, but often. Often, other feelings, quieter feelings, feelings that may at first be not even seen, not even registered. So oftentimes, anger, in that expression, in the fullness of the expression, is resting on -- this came up in the question and answer period, but I'll go into it again -- resting on quieter feelings, resting on more subtle feelings, more, in a way, fragile and gentle feelings. Really, really important, if that's the case -- and it often is the case -- really important to let ourselves contact that. And we do that just by being with the sensations of the anger and holding and allowing them. It will take us. It's like something filters down, so to speak, or you could say the quieter feelings begin to reveal themselves through the mindfulness, through the allowing -- really, really important.
And what comes? What do we see? Oftentimes, when there's anger, we see a feeling of hurt, feeling of I've been hurt. Might also be to someone else, but hurt is there. Frustration is often one of these more subtle feelings. So the leap from frustration to anger is actually just quite a small one. Frustration is like a germinal anger. Oftentimes, when there's anger, and we're with it, and we trace these feelings down to what's quieter, we get a sense, perhaps, of, say, powerlessness. So how often we feel angry at someone -- if we look, there's a sense of, "Somehow, they made me feel powerless." And we can't kind of fully handle that. And so it stays on the frothy surface.
If we just trace it down, if we just open out, and allow it to filter down, what we'll find -- what we can find sometimes is that feeling of powerlessness. And sometimes we feel powerless in relationship to a person, that they've made us feel powerless. Or could be anything -- could be an economic system. Could be a group of people, a nation. Could also be life. And we feel angry at life, or angry at God. Maybe we've got some really bad news. Maybe we have got a terminal illness, or someone we love has died, and we realize our powerlessness: I can't bring them back. I can't reverse death. I'm powerless in the face of that. One of the responses can be rage, can be anger. And just underneath, it's really this feeling of powerlessness. It's so hard to tolerate. It's so hard to open to, and to be with. Can be sadness lurking, resting underneath the anger.
But this is quite an important process. As we said, again, in the question and answer period, this is really where the healing is, and where the kind of, in a way, the real action is emotionally. This is the stuff that really needs the attention. It really needs the embrace of mindfulness. And all kinds of stuff can be just under the surface of anger. Can be fear. Sometimes, even, it's fear of what other people think of us if we don't act angry. Can be all kinds of stuff.
So this, just that sounds quite simple, but actually it's a real art to develop that, and to be able to do it, and even just to be willing to do it. It takes time. For most people, takes time. It's a practice. But this is really, I would say, the centrepiece. I'm going to say much more, but that's the centrepiece. That's the basis, if you like.
Now, sometimes, a person does this, and they're with it, and it traces down, it opens up, and these other levels of feelings begin to reveal themselves: hurt, powerlessness, frustration, etc., despair, whatever it is. And in that, same process: holding those, being aware of those, letting the mindfulness kind of embrace those, and come into contact with those. And there's healing in that. Healing can happen. Sometimes, something's happened, and we're angry, and that's all we need to do. That's all we need to do: carve out the time, find the space, be with the sensations, see what's underneath, feel that, hold that, the whole thing dissolves, end of story. Beautiful, lovely. Always? No. Sometimes, that's just not going to happen. It's not going to be the case.
As meditators, oftentimes, it's like we put all our eggs in the mindfulness basket. And we expect that that process that I just described will -- "I should be able to let go of everything. This is right here. In my heart, in my mind is where the letting go needs to happen. And if it hasn't happened yet, it's just a matter of kind of sitting more, and being with it more, and being more mindful, and eventually that's what should happen." And yet, I certainly don't think that's true. It might be that we -- same process, we're with the feelings, we're holding what's going on, we're in touch with what's going on. We come to a point where we realize: "No, I actually need to communicate something. I actually need to say something to this person or this group of people. I actually need to make a statement," as I was saying earlier this morning. Or: "I need to hear something from them. And I need to tell them that I need to hear it, whether it's an apology, or whether it's a clarification or something."
So we imagine that letting go will take care of everything, but practice is also about communication. It's not just about eyes shut, mouth shut. It's actually the relational and the level of communication between people, and that's practice as well. And it may well be that it's not enough for me to let go here. It just doesn't do it. It won't do it, because there's more that needs to be said, and more that needs to be communicated. So I might be sitting with this process of mindfulness, and trying to let go, and realize, "Oh. I need to communicate something." Then I have to really realize it. I have to really acknowledge that and be aware of that. But then comes the next hurdle. I have to go and say something, or I need to -- you know, there needs to be a communication. [11:42]
If we go back to the beginning, and this element of anger that's about the desire to hurt, and the desire to make another suffer, I feel, as much as possible, we need to wait, wait with our inner process, be with our inner process in terms of mindfulness and the emotions that are there, wait until we feel pretty sure, 99 per cent sure that when we go and communicate, our communication will be drained of the desire to hurt. I can see it lurking. I can see it in there. It's in there. And I just, I'm with my process, and with the feelings underneath, and so that I'm sure that when I go, it's barely there at all. It's just gone because of my mindfulness, my openness of my process. That process of letting the desire to hurt drain out of what's inside us, that may take time. It may take seconds, it may take minutes, it may take sometimes months. That's not a judgment. It's just saying, sometimes we feel so hurt, and so stuck in that, and so abused or whatever it is, that sometimes it really takes a long time, you know. But in terms of helpful communication, really healthy and helpful communication, we need that piece to be drained out as much as possible.
And then comes the next hurdle. Do I know how to say something in a way that can be heard, that's constructive? And I don't have anywhere near enough time to go into this today. But that's quite a thing in itself: skilful, wise communication. We talk about Right Speech. How do I go about expressing something when I feel angry, when I feel hurt, when I want to set boundaries, when something difficult has happened, and I do that, standing in my truth, without any desire to hurt, in a way that the other person can hear? And there can be some negotiation and some healing there. That, I think, is a huge art and a huge skill in the Dharma. It seems to me that also as a species, we need to kind of learn that a bit more, a lot more.
Okay. So there's mindfulness, that approach that I just kind of outlined. We were talking as well, in the question and answer period, about loving-kindness meditation. This, some of you will know, many of you will know, what we call mettā. So what's the place of bringing the opposite energy in to work there, and just kicking in this mettā practice, and inclining the mind, directing the mind gently towards softening, towards care, towards friendliness for ourselves and for other -- and maybe for the person or people that we're angry at? Hugely powerful, hugely powerful, immense, its place in practice. I don't so much want to talk about formal mettā practice now as actually talk about how that comes into the whole, in a general sense, into the way we work with anger.
Listen to the Buddha. This is from the Dhammapada. The Dhammapada is a collection of free verses that the Buddha said at different times, very beautiful, and very moving, a lot of it, very well-known:
"He insulted me. He hit me. He beat me. He robbed me." For those who brood on this, hostility [or hatred or anger] is not stilled. [For those who brood on that, it's not stilled.] "He insulted me. He hit me. He beat me. He robbed me." For those who don't brood on this, hostility is stilled.[1]
And this is one of the most famous passages of the Buddha, very, very beautiful:
Hatred never ceases through hatred. Hatred only ceases through non-hatred [and love]. This is an ancient [and eternal] truth.[2]
So there's a huge place for possible softening, possible bringing in a different heart orientation, and bringing in the mettā, bringing in a quality of empathy. So that word 'empathy' is really, really important. Something happens. Anger, so to speak, is held in place by non-empathy, by non-empathizing, seeing someone as separate, as other, as alien, as non-understandable, somehow. And that polarizing, and then distancing, non-empathizing -- that vacuum, if you like, fuels the anger. Actually, it's not a vacuum; it's full of rejection.
I found something quite remarkable quite a while ago, but this is from -- it was twenty-five years ago. Do you remember the IRA put a bomb in Brighton, the Tory party conference -- do you remember this? And Anthony Berry MP was one of the people killed in that bomb. His daughter, Jo Berry -- I don't know how old she was, but she was quite young at the time, and she was sort of somehow, you know, her life just fell apart at this place. She loved her father very much. But slowly, some time afterwards, she decided to begin visiting Ireland, and just learning a bit more, and trying to move towards some kind of reconciliation. It's an incredible amount of pain that she'd been through. And she began working and talking with victims and combatants from both sides of the Troubles. In November 2000, she met Pat Magee. Pat Magee was the mastermind of the bombing of the hotel, and the man responsible for her father's death. And she just talks. I just want to read you a little bit, because it's very insightful, what she gleans from her process with this. She says:
An inner shift is required to hear the story of the enemy. For me the question is always about whether I can let go of my need to blame, and open my heart enough to hear [Pat's] story and understand his motivations. The truth is that sometimes I can and sometimes I can't. It's a journey and it's a choice, which means it's not all sorted out and put away in a box.
It felt as if a part of me died in that bomb. I was totally out of my depth but somehow I held on to a small hope that something positive would come out of the trauma.
So she began this process, and the first time, she sort of -- in the first instances, she jumped in and she was wanting to forgive, and wanting immediately to forgive, and she had this whole process with forgiveness, and realizing that actually wasn't quite where it was at, that immediate impulse to forgive. And she goes on. She says:
Now I don't talk about forgiveness. To say "I forgive you" is almost condescending -- it locks you into an 'us and them' scenario keeping me right and you wrong. That attitude won't change anything. But I can experience empathy, and in that moment there is no judgement. Sometimes when I've met with [Pat], I've had such a clear understanding of his life that there's nothing to forgive.
I wanted to meet [Pat] to put a face to the enemy, and see him as a real human being. At our first meeting I was terrified, but I wanted to acknowledge the courage it had taken him to meet me. We talked with an extraordinary intensity. I shared a lot about my father, while [Pat] told me some of his story.
She says more, but she concludes:
Perhaps more than anything [I'm beginning to realise] that no matter which side of the conflict you're on, had we all lived each other's lives, we could all have done what the other did.[3]
Very powerful, very extreme -- so thankfully, most of us don't deal with that end of things. But very powerful. She really gave herself to this process and investigated it. Very insightful. However, you know, more everyday, for most of us: again, someone says something, and it rubs us the wrong way, or we don't feel appreciated, or whatever it is. What does empathy mean in that case? What often happens, when we feel anger, often, not always, but often, is the mind rushes in very quickly and kind of locks into place with a view of what's gone on, what's happened, where the person's come from, what their intentions were, etc. "This is what happened, and this is why, and that's what you were intending." A lot of the time, that's semi-conscious. We're not even aware that we're believing the other person intended this or that. So just kind of being aware of this process, of this mental locking that happens very quickly in quite a complex way. We don't have all the info, or very, very rarely do we have all the info about a situation. So this was my perspective, but what was your perspective? What do you know, what did you know that I didn't know? It's important to be asking these questions, because it opens it out from the locking, from the locked mental view, into, "This is my perception. This is my story. What's your story?"
So a person, two people will always have different info on what happened, on what led up to what happened, on the conditions around what happened that fed into it -- always, almost always. They will also almost always have different perceptions of what happened. So it's important to us -- are we on the same page about what we're talking about? Are we seeing this differently? And if so, why? What's feeding your perception? What's feeding my perception? This opening out and looking, again, underneath the level of the mental view, and again, the intentions, and to check that out. So opening that out, out of the sense of locking.
This word, 'empathy,' we can make it even wider. So that piece, those verses from the Buddha, the very next verse, actually, in the Dhammapada, is:
Unlike those who don't realize that we're here on the verge of perishing, those who do: their quarrels are stilled.[4]
So contemplating death, my death, and your death, our commonality, our common humanity in our mortality -- used well, this is something that heals, something that heals rifts. [23:08]
They did a study. Psychologists did a study. They were of different prisons in the United States. And they were a little bit curious, because in many prisons, it turned out that the prisoners on death row, unlike the prisoners in the rest of the prisons, were actually kind to each other, and civil to each other, and got on pretty well. There was very little gang warfare and kind of unkindness there. And so they went in with their questionnaires and their tests and their white coats. But the prisoners were just like, "Well, we know why it is. It's because we know we're going to die." It was very simple for them. It was very clear: that sense of our togetherness in our mortality softens things.
Tsongkhapa, one of the great, great Tibetan teachers, talks about this. He says, contemplating our mortality, it's like you're falling off a cliff with someone you're angry with. Are you going to argue on the way down? [laughter] The only time that happens is in Indiana Jones films. [laughter] In a way, it doesn't make sense when we have the right perspective.
So there's mindfulness, there's empathy, and there's certainly mettā, which I haven't really gone into today, and I won't. But there's also the place, always with practice, of noticing, of reflecting, of the kind of power of the mind to question, to really probe deeply and question. One of the lines of questioning is: "What are the consequences of my anger?" In a relationship, whether it's a spouse, or a partner, or a friendship, or a family relationship, when anger is unskilfully expressed, when we just lash out, and we just let it out because that's how we feel, how easily that destroys relationships. Relationships are fragile. And sometimes people talk about just being completely honest and venting. But basically, it's hard to vent without a person feeling hurt. And sometimes the hurt is just too much, and we've broken a relationship. And sometimes, despite the fact that a genuine, deep "sorry" goes a really long way, sometimes we've broken it and can't fix it, because of the unskilful expression of anger. And sometimes, what happens in an ongoing friendship or relationship is that the aversion, the anger comes out in more subtle ways, in a sort of more ongoing way. [25:59] And again, it's eroding the trust. It's sabotaging the whole relationship. It's rusting the whole fabric of the relationship. And it won't be the same intimacy, the same connection, the same love, the same care. Something eats away at the love there. So this is a consequence. It's really important to reflect on it.
Another consequence that the Buddha's very fond of reflecting on, for some reason, is that anger makes us unattractive.[5] [laughter] So I could be incredibly handsome, or you could be incredibly beautiful. And I could be rigged out in my Armani suit -- one of my Armani suits. [laughter] And adorned with various adornments, etc., and my cologne, and all that. But basically, when I'm angry, when the venom of that comes out, no one's going to find me attractive. It's ugly. It's an ugly energy. I don't know why the Buddha was so fond of that one, but what I think is more important is that people are uncomfortable around us. When we're angry, and spilling it out in unskilful ways, and when we have a habit of doing that, and people sense that energy, people are basically on their guard around us. They cannot relax. We cannot give them -- the Buddha talks about the beautiful gift of fearlessness. We're not creating that energy field, if you like, around us. People are uncomfortable. Do we want to be doing that? Do we not want a sense of people feeling at ease and safe around us? It's such a beautiful gift to put out into the world -- so precious.
So questioning, considering. Another possibility: the desire for revenge. I was reading an article. It was a very short article. I read this is genetically programmed into the DNA. I don't know how they figured that out, but apparently, let's say, this person, journalist who was writing, says, genetically imprinted. But still, Dharmically speaking, so what if it is? So what? Still question it. Still probe it. What possible benefit ...? It's important to realize that we have that impulse. We do have that impulse, revenge, in us sometimes. But what possible benefit could I possibly get from someone else's suffering, or someone getting what they justly deserve, their just deserts? How could that possibly benefit me in any way? Really questioning that way -- in a way, standing up to that impulse, and questioning.
If I look, if I have that impulse for revenge -- it might be very little; I just want to kind of put someone down a little bit, or whatever. If I have that, again, it's very interesting feeling into what's going on there. I'll probably notice, if I'm with the feeling, if I'm noticing the impulse, if I give it some mindfulness and some investigation, that what I want to do is equalize the powerlessness. I feel powerless. I couldn't -- whatever it was. And I want them to feel the same way. This could be because we feel physically intimidated by someone or psychologically intimidated, whatever. But I want that powerlessness -- I want them to taste that.
However, again, tracing it down, if I can be with that, and be with the desire for revenge, and I feel it, and see, "Oh. It's I want them to ...", and I feel that desire to equalize the powerlessness, and I feel into that, and I let that be there, I'm pretty much sure that every time, what goes with that is not happiness. It's just not happiness. It's actually sadness. And the very feeling of wanting to equalize the powerlessness will feel sad, will actually feel futile. It's not happy. And you can sense in the honesty, in the openness of it, in the sensitivity, it doesn't lead to happiness. It just doesn't go there. [30:18]
They did another psychological study in the States around death row prisoners, and this one was rather with the families of victims of murders, and the murderers being on death row. You understand what I mean? And they looked for families or relatives or friends or whatever that wanted to pursue the death penalty, and often wanted to be there and watch the murderer die. What they found was that in all this desire to be there, not one instance of a person feeling satisfied. Saw them die, saw their last breath, got revenge, done -- didn't feel the satisfaction that they thought they would. It's just not satisfying.
There's something at a whole other level more interesting here, or interesting too. Anger -- we feel like, "When I get it out, when I have my revenge, when I express it, when I vent it, I'm going to feel better." That's the feeling. I'm going to go into this later on. But actually, anger does the opposite. It builds on itself. Anger has a mechanism within it that it builds on itself. This is interesting.
Years ago, late eighties, I was living in America, and I was working with a therapist. And first few weeks of therapy, she said, "You've got a lot of anger. You need to let it out." And she had an idea, which was, "Go to the local gym, and get some boxing gloves, and one of those big punchbags, and really, you know, let it out." So I dutifully went. I was curious, and I was in my early twenties, I think. So grabbed a huge, huge punchbag thing. It's double my size, and in a room full of boxers with me. [laughter] Anyway, so I started punching this, and trying to get in contact with the anger, and I'm punching. And as I punched, I got more angry. I thought, "This is great. I'm really connecting with it now. I'm really opening up. It's really coming." [laughter] Punch, punch, punch. The more I punched, the more it came. And I did this for weeks. [laughs] A little slow on the pickup -- that actually there was something in the process that was feeding it, something in this venting that was feeding the very feeling of anger. And I ended up splitting the boxing gloves and having bleeding knuckles and all the rest of it. I was very keen. [laughter] And eager.
But slowly, the coin dropped. And I realized, "Something else is going on here, and it's not what I was told. It's more complex than that." Apparently, neurologists found the expression of anger -- all it does is, it increases the likelihood of neurons flowing along the circuit of being more angry, and more likelihood of being more angry in the future. Interesting. [33:42]
So, this questioning. One of my teachers used to say, when you're angry, one thing you can do is keep questioning, "Why am I angry? Why am I angry? Why am I angry? Well, I'm angry because they did this. Well, why are you angry at that?" And then say, "Because da-da-da-da-da. Well, why are you angry at that? Buuuwuuuughda." [laughter] "Well, why are you angry at ...?" And then keep going. Keep badgering it. Keep badgering it. He said eventually, every time the angry part of the mind answers something, you keep challenging it, and eventually, you'll get to some kind of ridiculous belief and assumption like, "Well, everyone should be nice all the time," or something. [laughter] It's possible.
This is interesting -- goes back to the Buddha -- there's a very curious discourse by the Buddha, sutta by the Buddha. I found this very strange when I first came across it. He talks about equanimity, sort of steadiness of mind, in relationship to anger. He says, someone asked him, "Well, why do we get angry, and what can we do about it?" And he said, "Basically, there are nine reasons for people being angry." [laughter] Classic, extreme Buddha. He said, "Either in the past, you think, 'Someone, this person has harmed me.' Or you think, 'In the past, this person has harmed those I love.' Or you think, 'This person, in the past, has been [this is interesting] helpful to those I don't like.'" [laughter] So one of those three. And then he does the same thing. He says, "Or, 'In the present, this person is harming me,' 'This person is harming those I like,' 'This person has been helping those I don't like.' Or 'In the future ...'" So it's a very curious sort of, you know, noughts and crosses kind of grid thing he does. And he said, "Basically, it's one of those."[6] So, very odd, but then he says, "Then, you should see this, and then reflect." This is the part I found really odd. He said you should reflect: "Well, what should I expect? It's the way of the world."[7]
I read that, and I thought it was so strange, and so kind of -- it just sounds so impotent as a kind of approach. But actually, it's very powerful. It's very interesting. I don't know why it's powerful. It's resetting our view, I think. It's opening our view. It's allowing some equanimity in. Equanimity is not the same as coldness and indifference. It's not cynicism: "Well, the world is full of cheats, and I don't trust anyone anyway" or something. It's not saying that. It's just opening up something, and acknowledging the truth of the way the world is, giving it more space. So indifference is cold, disconnected, and cynical, and this is not that. This is just more spacious.
Oftentimes, what happens when we're angry and locked into anger is, we're very focused on perhaps one person or one group of people. And in a way, we're missing the humanity of what's going on. So this is related to what we were just talking about. We're missing the kind of bigger picture. Sometimes, instead of just focusing on the other person, it's almost like stepping back and getting the sense of two people having difficulty with each other, arguing with each other about something, whether it's partners or spouses or parents and children or friends. And this has gone on since before recorded history. There's something very human about it. In a way, it's natural, you could say. And in a way, rather than seeing that person from the perspective of this person -- which is what we tend to do, that's how we tend to look at the world: I see you from me -- rather than that, it's almost like stepping back and seeing us, and seeing the humanity of us, and the humanity of us in conflict. And it softens the whole thing, because again, there's, first of all, less self, less personalization, and more space, more softness, more allowing. [38:13]
In a way, that leads to another piece. When there's anger, and in fact, when there's any suffering, one of the central kind of centre pins of the whole mechanism is the self, the sense of self, the sense of ego, very much at the core of what's going on. And we need to see this. We need to investigate this when we're angry, and in our lives generally.
How easy -- and we can see it with ourselves, we can see it with others, we can see it with nations and, again, political groups. How easily the self gets identified with, "I'm the good guy, and they are the bad guy." And again, it can be personal, or can be geopolitical and ideological. And how easy, actually, "I need you to feel bad," or rather, "I need you to be the bad guy if I'm going to be the good guy." Do you see that? I need to polarize the perception in that way. And with this, there's identification and self. The self is identified with being the good guy. And it needs to put you in the place of being the bad guy. And with that, the whole sense of self is pumped up. With the pumping up of the sense of self is the pumping up of anger. It goes with that whole perception.
Oftentimes, there's anger when the self-view is threatened. Have you noticed this, when something about the way we see ourselves is threatened, or our identity is threatened? How easy it is to get into "us and them" with so many things. So yesterday, some of us went on the climate demonstration. And I found it very beautiful. It was very filled with love. It was a very lovely thing. But how easy it would be to turn that into us versus them -- versus Big Business, or whatever it is. And then there's the polarity: the self is over here, something's being identified with, and some other self is being identified with something else. And in that, anger -- it brews easily in that dynamic. So the question, one of the questions is, "What am I identifying with?" Because that's the thing that anger will wrap itself around -- what I'm identifying with.
So it's not that we want to throw out what's good and what's bad. We don't want to, say, throw the baby out with the bathwater. But there's something here that's very, very important, very deep, from a Dharma perspective. We want to investigate it. Let's backtrack. As a Dharma practitioner, I can take up different ways of working at different times. Many of you will have heard about this Dharma teaching of anattā or no-self or not-self. That's a view that I can pick up and use, to work with at times.
So it's interesting. I feel angry at you. I feel angry at someone. And to ask myself, "What, exactly, who, exactly, am I angry at? So am I angry at their body? Am I angry at their fingernails, this person? Am I angry at their spleen? Am I angry" -- you know, playing with this. "Okay, no. It's not the body. Oh, it's not the body. I'm angry at their mind. Okay, but what's that? I'm angry at their emotions? Can I be angry at their emotions? I'm angry at their intentions. That sounds like it's getting hotter. That's what I'm angry at." But basically, what we do is we put a self there. Can I find the self? Say, "Okay, it's the intentions. That's who they are." Is it? Intentions come and go. What's more than that, intentions come and go dependent on perceptions and environment and past history and all kinds of stuff. Where's the self in that? Do you understand this? If I really go looking for the self that I feel myself to be angry at, I will not find that self. I dissect the person's self -- not really! [laughter] In your mind, dissect the person. You won't find a self there. When I can't find a self, the anger has got nothing to base itself on. It cannot be. It cannot stand.
But what I said before, this view is flexible. So I can pick that view up and work with it as a practitioner. Other times, I want to be talking in terms of self. You and I have a difficulty, and I say, "Oh, well, there's no self. Get over it." [laughter] You're going to punch me on the nose! I have a flexibility as a practitioner. Sometimes, we need to be talking in terms of, "This self feels hurt. How does that self feel?" I need to be talking in terms of selves. Other times, dissect it. Dismantle it. [43:22] If I'm using that non-self thing, it needs to be kind of authentic, because it's very easy to go into denial with that. So I need to be skilful and honest and authentic.
Still talking about investigating this whole business of anger and how it gets built. I'm very interested in how this thing called anger and this difficulty called anger gets built. When we're angry, it's important to notice that anger colours our perception of things. When I'm angry at you, I see you in a certain way. I see you almost with horns sticking out. Actually, it colours the perception. We say in English, "I was seeing red." It's commonly acknowledged: it colours the perception a certain way. This is really, really crucial. It ends up being one of the most important factors here. I'm going to come back to it, but for right now, just to say a little bit: usually, we only see it afterwards. In the middle of it, I don't -- I'm not fully conscious of it. But afterwards, I see, "God, I was really seeing, you know, I was really seeing red." We have to admit this. I have to admit this. Just as a human being, never mind a practitioner, just in terms of psychological maturity, and kind of growing up, I have to admit that that goes on, and that I fall into that sometimes. There's just a level of honesty there.
But Dharmically speaking, there's a whole other level, which is, what happens here? I'm angry. I see you, or I see the situation in a certain way, with or through a certain lens, perceived a certain way, and then what? I start reacting to my perception. The whole thing is feeding back on itself, snowballing on itself. I start reacting to my perception, because it's an ugly, unattractive perception of, "You're basically a baddie." I start getting angry at that. It feeds more perception. It goes. So it goes round. Saṃsāra -- so it goes round. This is really important, because it's one of the ways that anger and afflictive emotions get built. And as practitioners, that's one of the golden questions: how does all this stuff get built?
So we're very interested in this. Sometimes, anger or aversion is built by greed. And sometimes anger and aversion builds greed. When I'm upset with someone, or when I'm aversive towards a situation -- and it could be anything; it could be a job, it could be a life situation, could be a partner -- when I have aversion, anger, can be that something else, something other (maybe before, my last girlfriend or whatever, or this other person, or whatever it is, the next job, the last job) looks great. This is working as two sides of the same coin. They're colouring each other, and vice versa. Greed will also feed anger.
The question with this, both these two things that I've just said is, am I believing? Am I believing aversion and greed? They come into the mind, and they cloud the mind. And they're basically wily tricksters. They're not trustworthy in what they're reporting about reality, or so-called reality. They're colouring everything. And they're seductively persuading one way or another. Am I believing anger, aversion, or greed? I have to realize that they're tricksters. Really, really important. They seem, it seems so real when there's greed. It seems so convincing when there's anger there.
Sometimes, what can be really helpful is just holding it in mind that this is probably not the reality. Just that much can be enough to sort of loosen things, and give a bit more space, and soften things -- just believing it less.
How's the energy? You still okay? [affirmative noises] Yeah? Sure?
So how is this built? This, if I can answer, ends up being the really freeing thing, how it's built. A lot of times, anger, aversion is built through perceptions and views. I was reading recently about the genocide in Rwanda, and how, basically, during colonial times, to divide and conquer a certain -- how to say it? -- ethnic segregation was suggested very strongly by the colonial powers, and then actually took root in the culture. It didn't exist there beforehand between the Hutus and the Tutsis. And that bred, and it bred anger, and it bred aversion. It bred perceptions in certain directions. And eventually it bred genocide. And it was a perception, it was a view, and it was fed. And it was fed by propaganda, and it snowballed on itself.
Similarly, you go back to the Second World War, and the Nazis and the Jews -- something very similar. I actually was reading an interview with a man who used to be, in Apartheid-era South Africa, was a guard in a prison. I'm not sure if it was in the same prison that Nelson Mandela was in, but there was an interview with him, and he said, in their training to be guards, they were full out, straight up told to regard the prisoners, the Black prisoners, the indigenous African prisoners as no better than animals. That was actually what they were told. It's inculcating a certain view. And then out of that, all kinds of other things were possible, all kinds of other -- well, horror is possible.
Again, that's quite extreme; sometimes it's just much more subtle. Earlier I said something about intentions. We oftentimes assume we understand something about another's intention. Or we, "You did this. This is what happened. And I know you did it to hurt me." And we assume that a person deliberately did it to hurt us. It's interesting. We can kind of pretend that that's not the case, but actually it's operating. Or we can say, "Well, I'll just get rid of that intention, that belief." But it's probably unrealistic. Rather, just to air it, and be aware of it, and then begin questioning it. And maybe question the other person.
Even more, perhaps, subtly, on the level of thought and perception, the way they build aversion. A person might feel, trying to meditate, their mind gets -- I had someone really locked into something very painful recently, trying to meditate, and keeping being distracted, and the mind wandering, and the mind going to this and going to that. Somehow, he had the belief that the mind shouldn't be doing that, and it was really, really something completely wrong that no one else ever went through. So much aversion, so much suffering wrapped up with that, believing: "This shouldn't be happening. I shouldn't be distracted." So these thoughts of what should or shouldn't be, or "I bet no one else is this ...", whatever, they're also building the anger, building the aversion. [51:38]
Earlier, I think it was this morning, I said any bad mood or any unhappiness involves aversion. Any unhappiness involves aversion. There are aspects to that, but one piece I want to pull out, because it's very, very significant, is: when there's a difficult mood, or an unhappiness, there's always aversion to the mood itself. There's always aversion to the mood itself, whether it's fear or anger or depression or whatever. In the case of anger, as I said before, the physical sensations of anger are often quite unpleasant, and quite kind of unbearable, intolerable. There's a pressure, there's an agitation inside, there's turbulence. And towards the very sensations that make up the anger, there will be aversion. There's a rejection of that: I don't want it here. That mechanism is partly why people -- why we explode with anger sometimes. I can't tolerate what's in here. I need to get it out. And it feels like, "Getting it out, I will be free of these sensations." Of course, this isn't conscious. We don't think this. We react. So we explode, we lash out, we act and speak with impulsivity, because I can't contain it. It feels like I can't contain these sensations of the anger itself, and it wants release -- it needs to be released.
So what to do about that piece? What to do about that little loop within the whole thing? One possibility is to learn to calm the sensations in the body with the breath. Here are some agitated, pressured sensations inside -- actually using the breath to soothe, to calm, learning to do that. So oftentimes, we talk, you'll hear in Dharma circles: "Don't try and control the breath. Don't do this. Don't do that." Actually, sometimes it's really, really helpful. Breathe in a way that you're kind of stroking the sensations of anger. And they calm down. They soothe. Really, really skilful. Or with the mettā practice, as we were talking earlier, it changes the perception of the body and what's going on in the body -- really, really helpful.
But it's also possible to actually feel into the intolerable sensations, like we were saying before, but really emphasize kind of letting them be there. Really emphasize giving them lots of space, and welcoming the unpleasantness of the anger sensations themselves. Does that make sense? I'm almost done, so I know it's a long talk, but ... can you ... five minutes more okay? [affirmative noises] Yeah? Good.
So just to say that little piece again: going into the sensations of the anger, and actually focusing on giving them lots of space inside, letting them be unpleasant, but welcoming them, welcoming them. That softens. It softens our relationship to them, which softens the whole dynamic.
Okay, for the last piece, I want to jump a level and talk about more subtle aversion, by which I don't mean when you're angry at someone or something like that. I'm just talking about something like, I've got a pain in my back. I've got a pain in my knee. I've got a tummy ache. I've got a sound that's bothering me or something -- just a little bit. It's no great shakes. We were talking in the question and answer period: sometimes it's really important to put the mindfulness, to look with the mindfulness at the relationship with rather than the object itself. So here's the pain. What's the relationship with? And actually feeling, getting really familiar with, what does it feel like for the relationship with something to feel like aversion? It feels a certain way. We can get very, very familiar with it, to the degree that we're very quick at picking up on when it's there, and very able to pick up on even just subtle layers of aversion. We're familiar with the feeling-tone of aversion in the body and in the mind, really getting used to it. Sometimes, just that awareness of a rejection of something will calm it down, will ease it sometimes.
What I'm talking about now, this more subtle end of aversion, it's like learning to swim in the shallow end of the swimming pool. You know, what applies to this also applies to when we've really got a lot of rage and a lot of anger, and it feels really unmanageable. We can kind of learn in the shallow end of the swimming pool. A lot of the same insights and ways of working and processes apply. So going back to Kevin's question in the question and answer period about working with pain, what I learn there -- subtle but really important, because a lot of the same principles apply. A lot of the same ways of working apply.
So mindfulness of the relationship, and not just the object that I feel aversive to -- really important. In time, it's even possible, as I get more familiar with, "What does it feel like for that relationship to feel tense with aversion, the body to feel like it's got this rejection of something?", and I get used to that, and in time, it's possible to learn to relax the aversion deliberately. I'm deliberately relaxing my relationship with something. Sometimes I do that through the body. Sometimes I do it in other ways. But learning how to relax the relationship of aversion, relax the aversion, relax the aversion, at more and more subtle levels. I don't need to be on retreat at Gaia House to be doing this. I was saying that just in response to someone's question, like, what we think is possible on retreat and off retreat -- we can do this sitting at the end of a busy day for half an hour. Just get used to working this way, more and more subtle, feeling the aversion, relaxing it, feeling the aversion, relaxing it. It's a skill. It's an art. We develop it with time.
So, interesting, something like tiredness -- tiredness is very interesting. I have tiredness, and it can feel like the whole body and mind is just full of tiredness, and I have to go to bed. And sometimes that's true, of course. But oftentimes, what's happened with tiredness is, aversion has got in there, and it's magnified the whole thing. If I really look, what actually is the experience of tiredness? Oftentimes I can barely find it. If I look inside, how do I know that I'm tired? What's giving me the cue, the clue that I'm tired? I look inside, and maybe all I find is a slight sort of sense of pressure behind my eyes, a slight sense of tightness behind my eyes. And what's happened is, the aversion has gone in there, and kind of pumped it up, injected it. And it's huge, and it takes up the whole body in this kind of amorphous sense of something we then feel overwhelmed by -- all pumped up by aversion. Very interesting, very common. So explore something like that. Check it out. Happens much more commonly than we might think.
Very last piece -- I promise. [laughter] If I follow this -- and this is what I'm talking about -- noticing aversion, and learning how to relax it, noticing aversion, and learning how to relax it, and learning to go deeper and deeper with that. If I pick this up as a thread of investigation in my practice, and I follow it, and I follow it deeper, and I develop it, something extremely, extremely odd begins to happen. I find that the aversion -- it's not that it's just colouring the perception of this pain, the perception of whatever stimulus in the environment, or whatever it is. It actually ends up being that, if I really let go of the aversion, and let go deeper, and let go deeper, the very pain itself begins to fade, to blur, to disappear. Has anyone ever noticed that? [affirmative noises]
It's very common for people to have that experience. What's very uncommon is to suck all the juice of the insight out of it. Right there is about one of the most radical understandings in the Dharma, one of the deepest levels of understanding in the Dharma, right there. We tend to think: "Here's our reality. I could be aversive to it. I could be equanimous. I could be greedy for it. I could be spaced out and distracted. But basically, my reality is my reality." Is it? The aversion builds the experience. The experience depends on the aversion. It's completely the wrong way round from what we intuitively feel our reality and life to be. Completely the other way around. The aversion builds the object. The object builds the aversion, because no object, no aversion. They build each other. In Dharma language, we say this is empty, this is empty. They're leaning on each other: two empty things, mutually dependent. That's the structure of reality.
So we can go into this, just with humble quality of aversion, go into it, and go into it deeper. It's opening a door into something so radical about the nature of reality, after which there's very little else to kind of uncover. But it's so counterintuitive that we really need to see it, and see it over and over again, until it begins turning our understanding of existence upside down. And in that upside-down-ness is the deepest level of freedom. It's the deepest level of freedom kind of available for a human being, right there in what we call the mutual emptiness of all things.
So just to kind of sum up very briefly, I said, going right back to the beginning -- anger, aversion, these are qualities that we have as human beings until, really, a very, very deep level of awakening, very deep level. They're going to be with us. Accept that they're part of our humanity. Not to judge them, but to be interested in these qualities, these energies, really, really interested. As we were just talking about, if I can really understand aversion, really go into it with curiosity and understand it, how it's built and how it affects -- the effects it has on the world of perception, the Buddha would say, and the Buddha did say, if I understand just that, there's nothing left to understand. It's right there.
Sources