On a recent Saturday morning, shortly after I began teaching meditation, I was on my way to teach a daylong retreat outside of Nashville. While driving on Granny White Pike, a busy two-lane street, I signaled and merged into the turn lane. Just as I did, someone in a white car sped up and honked at me multiple times.

The blasts startled me. I was driving at least the speed limit, I signaled and moved into the turn lane correctly, and, to my knowledge, I did everything completely normal. But the sudden blasts penetrated my body to the core and shook up my nervous system. I felt upset as I waited for the turn light. “What’s up with that guy, I did nothing wrong. What a jerk!”

We’ve all seen the headlines of road rage incidents that then escalate into dangerous, even fatal, encounters. This episode was harmless overall; the driver was gone, yet the lingering anger I felt remained. Then the voice of wisdom piped in, “you’re on your way to teach a retreat, you don’t want to carry this frustration in your nervous system a minute more.”

I then remembered a practice I can do while driving or at other times when an encounter throws me off. I center in on the place where I still feel the response—starting with my awareness of the angry thoughts, then bringing my attention to my body, feeling the agitation and contraction in my gut area. I take a few breaths and gradually let go of the narrative of “that driver was a jerk.” I often find, when bringing my attention to the physical sensation of agitation in the body and the breath, that the sense of self that often solidifies amid feeling wronged or hurt just melts away, especially when there is no recourse or further action needed. This act of going back to bodily awareness often supports a return to equanimity when the mind and heart are feeling agitated.

I didn’t want the driver to leave me with a second arrow; the first arrow being the horn, the second arrow being the anger and sense of being wronged one carries with them. As I remained present without proliferating thoughts, the anger and frustration began to dissipate. Nothing was left but the breath and my body, sitting at a traffic light. All was well, my nervous system had reset to ease. The light changed, and I drove the rest of the way to the retreat feeling at peace.

While teaching that morning, I used this encounter as an example of how to let go of feeling wronged in a situation where there is no external control or recourse. I explained how I unwound the tension and anger, all the way to a sense of self, and then let it go.

Compassion naturally arises when we get a glimpse into another person’s suffering.

During a break, a young man asked if we could meet privately. We went into a room at the back of the house, and he confided, “that story you told of the man who aggressively honked at you—I’m that guy.” I was stunned. How likely was that? He continued, “I’m not literally that guy, but that’s just like me, I can’t control my anger. My wife and child are leaving me. I’m losing everything that matters to me. I don’t want to live like this any longer, can meditation help me?”

My heart softened. The proverbial jerk on the road sat right in front of me, exposing his suffering and the real consequences that arose from his hostility. How often do we see behind the hardened surface to the actual human who we think is a jerk? Compassion naturally arises when we get a glimpse into another person’s suffering.

This angry man was willing to reveal his vulnerability. That’s rare. Because I had already unwound my own reaction from the encounter with an aggressive driver, I could more fully listen to and receive this man’s tenderness and feel connected to his suffering. While a different flavor from my own, I knew that in the deepest place, this man was another reflection of the ways I too was not fully awake.

An Exercise

Ahead of everyone’s busy holiday season of bustling and commuting, here is a step-by-step guide for how to unwind a reactive response:

• Begin by recognizing and bringing awareness to the reaction at the thought level, just noting without judgment the narrative itself. Don’t try to stop it, let it run for a minute through the spotlight of your awareness.
• Now find the place in your body where you find a corresponding felt sense of the reaction. Perhaps a tightness in your gut or chest, or a constriction at your throat.
• Begin to explore the way these sensations feel in your body. Notice if your mind returns quickly to the thought. Gently bring it back to the bodily sensations.
• Start to let go of the narrative as you stay with the physical sensations.
• Don’t demand anything, trust the wisdom of the body, and let go of trying to figure it out or change it.
• Now investigate if you can find a “me” or “mine” in these sensations. Chances are, you can’t.
• Just continue to rest your attention at the sensations for a few more minutes. As you disidentify from these thoughts and the sense of self that felt wronged, you’ll likely begin to relax and return to equilibrium.

The post Awakening with a Rude Driver appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The ring of a bell signaled it was my turn for dokusan, an interview to discuss my practice with the Soto Zen Master at this five-hundred-year-old training monastery in Japan.

I picked up a small mallet and struck the cast iron bell in front of me: one time, letting it ring, then a second time. I rose and hurried down a long hall of tatami mats, the woven straw flooring in traditional Japanese living spaces, passing through the Ihai-do, a narrow room lined on both sides with rows of individual altars for deceased sangha community members. They silently witnessed the swish of cloth as my long black priest robe rubbed back and forth around my ankles with each quick step.

At the end of the hall, three steps rose up. I stopped at the bottom and performed a short gassho, bowing with palms touching and elbows out. Then in one swift motion, I grabbed the end of my zagu, or priest bowing cloth, laid it down on the tatami, and folded it into a square. I dropped down and started my full prostrations as quickly as possible—body crouched in child’s pose, both hands outstretched and palms placed up on the floor, then, with symmetrical precision, hands raised past the ears and down again before rising to stand. I did this three times quickly, as is the custom, after which I refolded and slid the zagu back over my left wrist. One more quick gassho and then I headed up those three stairs to my dokusan with Sekkei Harada Roshi, the Abbot of Hosshinji monastery in Obama, Japan. I entered the room ready to ask the central question of my life.

I had come to Japan after leaving the predominantly white convert Soto Zen Buddhist monastery in central California where I had thought I would spend the rest of my life. When I had asked to be ordained after more than eight years of meditative Buddhist practice, I had felt a deep calling to live as a Buddhist monastic. But this did not come to be. I left the California monastery after three and a half years there, heartbroken and confused about the racism I had experienced on both a personal and structural level. The persistent white supremacy culture of the monastery made it unsafe and did not support me as a Vietnamese American practitioner. This was true for many other people of color staying there as well. The experience was a huge shock to my understanding of Buddhism, Buddhist practice, and my sense of place in the world.

As I made plans to leave that California monastery and figure out how to practice as a newly ordained priest, I was contacted by someone who studied under Sekkei Harada Roshi in Japan. They urged me to study with him as he was acknowledged as an enlightened Zen Master. I had only practiced Soto Zen in predominantly white convert settings in the United States, and I felt drawn to practice in Japan, the birthplace of this sect of Buddhism.

I had been at Hosshinji for three weeks, trying to process my despair from having to leave California due to the racism at my home monastery. Entering the room for dokusan with Sekkei Harada Roshi, I barely sat down before blurting out the quintessential question of my existence up to that moment. “Why does hatred seem to follow me wherever I go?” I asked.

Sekkei Harada didn’t hesitate. “Know hatred completely,” he answered. Then he grabbed the handbell to his right and rang it vigorously, signaling the end to my interview.

I scrambled out of the room, doing the prostrations and bows in reverse order.

My mind raced to make meaning of what had just happened.

Nothing came.

My mind had stopped.

A  koan in Zen practice is a story assigned by a teacher for you to work with. Various traditions have different ways of practicing with koans, but giving an answer to the teacher as part of the process is a commonality across sects. How the teacher accepts or rejects the answer is part of the mythology of this practice. A well-known koan is, “At this very moment, what is your original face before your parents were born?”

Many people think koans are paradoxes, but really they’re stories to stop your mind, to bump it off its loop of incessant and well-worn patterns of thinking, planning, and processing. Koans open us to an understanding that’s beyond habitual thinking.

Life also gives us koans.

For me, racism has been a koan I’ve turned over and over. Studying race theory was one of my answers to this koan. Other answers from my life have included activism and various jobs as a social worker focused on addressing the harmful results of racism.

All of these were good answers.

In Zen, we like to say, “The question is more important than the answer.” Why? Because questions often come up at uncomfortable moments. Deep questions arise when we’re faced with circumstances in which our coping mechanisms aren’t working anymore. At such moments, transformational change is possible if we stay open to all answers, especially unexpected ones.

The system of white supremacy centers whiteness while juxtaposing people of color as “other,” fragmenting us all into the delusion of separateness. Aware of this dynamic and its harm to people of color, I had to be careful to not simply search outside myself for answers. Like many Asian Americans and other people of color, at some point I had to learn to value myself, reclaiming the validity of my own experience in any moment and in any condition. Buddhist practice over many years has supported me to return to knowing and trusting my wholeness.

“Know hatred completely.” That moment with Roshi stopped my mind from its habitual looping to try to “understand” racism. All my intellectual theories and years of antiracist work didn’t address my suffering in a useful way at this crucial point of my life. That moment stopped my frantic search to find some reason why hatred kept following me. What I needed was to attend to the hurt and harm from being the target of racism.

In Buddhism, we practice to be able to find settledness and clarity that’s not dependent on the conditions of the world. To find such settledness and clarity, we have to attend to our suffering in body, heart, and mind. The koan of racism was not just something that I wanted to understand. What I really want, even now, is to heal from the hurt and pain I’ve carried.

In both activist and Buddhist practice realms, I felt that I had to choose between a rock and a hard place. For example, in feminist spaces, white women were most often touted as leaders, negating the many ways women of color brought groundbreaking exploration and transformation to gender oppression. Or in racial justice groups, male-identified BIPOCs often take up the most space, including leadership ones. Or, in many of the convert-based meditation groups I’ve taught at, I am thought to be “too religious,” especially as Buddhism-based practices have been appropriated into secularized popular “mindfulness” apps and health and self-care industries.

Similarly, I noticed that in predominantly white convert Buddhist centers, people of color were often told that race was not part of practice because “there’s no self.” When I tried to address racist incidents, I was told that this was to reify “a false sense of self.” If antiracism work was acknowledged by white leaders, then it was “just a relative stepping stone” on the way to an “absolute.” By default, given the predominantly white and mostly male teachers within convert Buddhism in North America, this “absolute” felt patriarchal, white-defined, and white-centered.

I needed a way to practice that started from the premise that there is racism in the world and that there are intense manifestations of it in the United States of America. Racism impacts us on the cushion, in meditation halls, in practice communities, in our places of work, in conversations with friends, at the doctor’s office, and everywhere we go. This is true whether we are people of color or white-identified. I needed a way to practice Buddhism that moved from only an individual focus to one that recognized the power and privilege embedded in our structures and systems and how we are impacted by them in different ways. In doing so, I hoped to discover how to heal from systemic hurts and harms.

The day after that mind-stopping meeting in Japan, Sekkei Harada Roshi offered me another chance for a dokusan interview. I rang the bell, did my bows, and went into the practice discussion room, ready to share my insights about how his answer had affected me. Before I could open my mouth, Roshi launched into a lengthy story of Shakyamuni Buddha’s life and enlightenment along with the histories of other early Buddhist ancestors. Then, once again, he rang me out of the room.

We never spoke about my question again.

This event impacted me deeply, and I continued to turn it over for many years afterward. When I remember my dokusans with Sekkei Harada Roshi, this last part has always puzzled me. I often wondered, What was his point about it all? In writing this now, I have an understanding of what he was teaching me. The Buddha and ancestors were searching for the same things as you and me: an end to suffering.

I think Roshi was saying that there can’t be spiritual bypass. He realized—and after that initial exchange I, too, realized—that I was looking for a way to explain away the hurt and pain by wanting to discuss it. Discussion isn’t wrong. Theory isn’t wrong. Activism isn’t wrong. But we can’t use these things for spiritual bypass. We can’t use Buddhist practice, or any methods such as race theory or activism, as a way to skip over the human condition inherent in the first noble truth—experiencing the hurts and pains of our lives. Trying to get away from them via any method is to try and skip over, or bypass, fully experiencing our life as it is. Our practice is to get closer and closer to “know it completely” because, in doing so, we can actually then have more clarity on how we can heal. In Pali, the first recorded language of Buddhism, the term yoniso manasikara is usually translated as “wise attention.” It can also be translated as “attention that takes the whole into account.” This is what Sekkei Harada Roshi was pointing me toward: the practice of investigating dukkha (suffering), which sees it in context, in totality, and not just the hurt and pain of the moment.

Then, the rest of the four noble truths offer us descriptions and practices for how to connect or reconnect to the wholeness of life—that our existence is seen, relevant, healable, and valued—when we remember and access the contexts that validate us and support us to thrive. Additionally, we need to remember that all beings want the same thing: to be free from suffering and the causes of suffering. This is what connects us all.

Denying that systems of oppression exist is to deny reality as it is. Learning to negotiate these systems with self- and collective-determined agency is the practice of engaged liberation. In practicing collective liberation, this is what I wish for us: that we may come home to a sense of wholeness grounded in what is safe and of value to all. May we then aspire to spread that out, to work together to strengthen safety and care for each other. This is the work, and the liberation, of understanding, practicing, and developing the four noble truths.

⧫

From Home Is Here: Practicing Antiracism with the Engaged Eightfold Path by Rev. Liên Shutt, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2023 by Rev. Liên Shutt. Reprinted by permission of North Atlantic Books.

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One of the Buddha’s most important insights was that what we experience in the present moment is not entirely caused by the past. Some of our experiences do come from past karma. But the important part is how we shape the raw material coming in from the past through our present intentions. The Buddha calls this process of shaping sankhara, or fabrication. 

There are three kinds of sankhara. There is a bodily fabrication, which is the in- and out-breath. There is a verbal fabrication, which the texts call directed thought and evaluation. It’s basically how you talk to yourself, the questions you ask, and the judgments you pass on things. And then there’s a mental fabrication, which is felt as perceptions. Feelings here are not emotions; they are more feeling tones: a tone of pleasure, a tone of pain, or a tone of neither pleasure nor pain. Perceptions are the labels you apply to things. If you were to compare verbal fabrication with perceptions, verbal fabrication would be full sentences or questions; perceptions are individual words or images.

The way you identify things is through these three processes. We shape the raw material coming in from the past and turn it into our experience of the present moment. The problem is that we tend to do this in ignorance. This is why instead of creating the happiness that we want, we end up creating stress and suffering. The Buddha tells us to do these processes with knowledge, and they can turn into the path to the end of suffering. 

Anger is a case in point. All three of these fabrications go into creating a sense of anger. Say that you have witnessed a situation that you don’t like, one you’d like to see changed, and you’re upset about it. The way you breathe is going to aggravate the anger. You tend to breathe in a tight, tense way. You can talk to yourself, both about the situation and about anger itself, in ways that aggravate it. You can focus more and more on how horrible the situation is and how quickly it needs to be changed. You can also talk to yourself about anger and think your anger is justified. It’s your way of showing that you can influence the world and that you can get things done through your anger. 

And then there are the perceptions and feelings. The feelings, in this case, would be feelings of discomfort because the breath is uncomfortable and the way you’re talking to yourself is uncomfortable. And then there are the perceptions: your perceptions about the situation—the person who has done or said something horrible is either a monster or a pig—and your perception of anger as being your way of showing your power in the world and being a warrior in the world. Now, the problem is many times we act on our anger thinking that we’re doing something skillful, something that’s to our benefit or the benefit of those we love. We find out later that this is not the case and that we’ve actually created trouble for ourselves. This is where the Buddha says we have to bring knowledge to these processes. 

First, we have to understand the anger in terms of these types of fabrication so we can take it apart and replace it with better fabrications. The techniques you learn with breath meditation help you right here so that you can reflect on what you’re doing as you focus on the breath. Of course, you have bodily fabrication in the breath itself. You have verbal fabrication in the questions you’re asking about how to breathe comfortably, how to let those comfortable breath sensations spread through the body, and how to keep the mind with the breath. Then there are mental fabrications, your perceptions you have of the breath as being a whole body process, the feelings of ease that you can create by the way you breathe. You have hands-on experience in these types of fabrication. You see how they can be used to create a sense of well-being right here, right now. And then you can bring that knowledge to the rest of your life. 

The techniques we learn on the meditation cushion are not meant just for the cushion. After all, we’re not creating suffering for ourselves only on the cushion. We go through life. So we’re going to take those techniques and use them on a day-to-day basis. 

The first thing to take is bodily fabrication. As you talk to yourself, remind yourself of all the stupid things you’ve done under the power of anger. It might be good to step back from the anger. See what you can do to take it apart. And then you focus on verbal fabrication. How are you breathing? Can you breathe in a way that calms you down? Think of the breath going all the way down to the feet, nourishing every part of the body. That sense that you have to get it out of your system begins to dissolve away. For the most part, we think that we have only two choices: either we get it out of our system by acting on the anger or we bottle it up. Neither way is helpful. If we bottle anger up, it becomes a thing that goes underground and shows its tentacles someplace else. If we act on anger, we end up creating trouble for ourselves. 

Here the Buddha is giving you an alternative to that sense of tightness. You have a body, and you can breathe through it. Dissolve it with good breath sensations. This may take time because that first burst of anger probably released some hormones into your bloodstream, and they’re still having their effect. And sometimes we read those signs as signs that we still are angry even though the actual anger may have passed. We stir it up again. Just remind yourself that it may take some time, but you can breathe in a way that calms down the sense of tension, tightness, and irritability in the body. This process allows you to look at the anger more objectively, more calmly, and to look at the situation more calmly and see what needs to be done.

This is where you bring in verbal fabrication. Ask yourself: Is that person or that situation as bad as you think it is? Is it as unbearable as you think it is? Here the Buddha gives you some ways of talking to yourself when someone has said something unpleasant or hurtful. He recommends two ways of depersonalizing the issue. One is just to tell yourself that the unpleasant sound has made contact with the ear. It’s there because of the contact, and when the contact goes, that’s the end of that unpleasant sound. How many times have you thought that when someone curses you or when someone says something harsh and vile? It’s not the first thing that occurs to you. But it’s useful because you realize that from that point on, once the contract has ended, the fact that it’s reverberating around in your mind is based on what you’re doing now. The action of the other person is over and done with. Do you want to keep on stabbing yourself with those words? It’s your choice. 

The second way of depersonalizing words is to remind yourself that human speech has all kinds. The nature of human speech is that there’s kind speech and unkind speech, true speech and untrue speech, where it’s said with an attitude that means well to you and where it’s said with an attitude that doesn’t mean well to you. This is the nature of human speech everywhere. The fact that you’re subjected to that kind of unkind or untrue or ill-intentioned speech is nothing out of the ordinary. All too often we find a situation horrible or totally unbearable. Everything is so extraordinary that we have extraordinary rights to react in a way. It’s not all that skillful. But when you realize this is the nature of the human world, this is the nature of human speech, you back off. You realize that the action was not extraordinary, so your rights are not extraordinary either. 

These are some ways of helping you pull yourself out of the unskillful verbal fabrication that finds the situation unbearable.

⧫

Learn more about the three kinds of sankhara in Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s Dharma Talk, “Skillful Approaches to Anger”, from which this excerpt was adapted. 

The post The Buddha’s Alternative to Acting out in Anger appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

There are a lot of reasons to be angry right now. It’s often said that if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention. But according to scholar Allison Aitken, anger only leads to further harm, no matter how justified it may feel in the moment. As a professor of philosophy, Aitken believes that Buddhist texts offer valuable resources for working with our anger and healing contemporary divisions. Drawing from the work of the 8th-century Indian philosopher Shantideva, she positions compassion as a substitute attitude for anger and lays out methods for moving beyond righteous rage.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sat down with Aitken to talk about how anger distorts our perceptions and how we can transform our rage into compassion. Read the excerpts on anger from Aitken below and then listen to the whole episode.

Tribalism is nothing new

There’s a kind of temptation to say things like, “Society has never been so divided” and to blame it on the rhetoric of our current political leaders or viral misinformation campaigns or other byproducts of the internet age. But I also think it’s important to recognize that this kind of divisive tribalism is nothing new. 

We might have contemporary manifestations of it that are brought about by a unique concoction of our own set of conditions, but the outcome is a familiar set of human emotions. I think that the Buddhist text tradition has a lot to offer when it comes to understanding anger and coping with it in the most productive way.

The root of anger is ignorance

Anger is prompted by ignorance, and co-occurs with ignorance. Whenever we’re faced with some kind of slight or wrong, our first impulse is often to pin things down into categories of right and wrong, good and bad, friend and enemy. Within this oversimplified view of the world, anger has a very clear target, and we might zero in on a particular individual or structure as being single-handedly responsible for what is wrong, when in fact the situation is always far more complex. When everything is in a neat box, I know who’s good, I know who’s bad, and I can feel good because I’m on the good side. It’s much more uncomfortable to start to scratch the surface and see that there’s more to the story.

Anger is suffering

In his Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life, Shantideva provides strategies for defusing your anger toward another person by seeing them as a victim of their own ignorance and developing an empathetic understanding of their circumstances. In other words, part of what it is to be angry is itself to suffer. Anger is, by its nature, an unpleasant mental state that also prompts further unpleasant mental states. 

There’s a stronger foe against injustice

We often think about cycles of anger as this kind of payback that never ends, so we might think that anger is a more sustaining force against injustice. But I think that compassion is actually a more efficacious and enduring foe of suffering and harm. A lot of people might worry that an emotion like compassion is not going to be powerful enough to confront injustice and we need something like anger. But if we think about the extraordinary lengths that a parent will go in order to alleviate the suffering of their child, then we can see the incredible power of compassion. 

Patience cannot be underrated 

From the perspective of the textual tradition, one thing that is unique about Buddhist thought is its incredible optimism for the possibility of human transformation. From Shantideva’s perspective, it is realistic to aspire to reach a state where one could respond to any situation—even someone dismembering you—with compassion based on an empathetic understanding of what each individual being involved in the situation is undergoing. Of course, this path takes eons. The idea is to take a long-term perspective and not to expect that one would reach the results immediately or even in this lifetime.

The post Buddhist Wisdom for Handling Moral Outrage appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

My son is 9, huddled down beside the toilet. I’m leaning over him, grabbing at his arm. We are both screaming, shrieking, cursing one another. All the energy in the house, in the whole universe it seems, has become a concentrated white light burning into this tiny bathroom. I am so wild with fury I can’t see, can’t even hear the words coming out of my mouth.

This is me, a Zen Buddhist practitioner of nearly twenty years.

Anger brought me into practice in my twenties. I was falling in love with the man I would later marry and have children with, and it was painfully clear that even his kindness wasn’t enough to defuse my rage. In fact, my anger seemed to expand alongside our growing intimacy, in a kind of terrible tango.

So I started to sit. With a Zen group, and alone. I read books, and listened to dharma talks. I sat through sesshins. I started to look at my anger with softer eyes, to pay attention to the terrified feelings beneath. I remember in a sangha discussion on the precept on anger, a friend recounted her appreciation of its liberating energy. But for me, despite Zen, and despite having an excellent therapist, anger still snapped at me like a metal trap. What l really wanted was to keep out of its way.

In time our daughter was born, followed closely by our son, and a few years later, another son. Three beautiful, healthy, wanted children. It was demanding of course, and a little dizzying to reorient from career and travel to domestic life. I was so grateful to have found a tradition that honored the wisdom of repetitive tasks done with a fresh mind. Chop wood, Carry water! Change diaper, puree pumpkin! We played, read stories, cuddled, laughed, baked cakes. All the astonishing ordinary acts of a loving family.

But as they grew into toddlers and beyond, the rage which could flare in my relationship with my husband, began stalking me as I cared for my children. That’s exactly how it felt: a stalking beast breathing on my neck, using me to invade our home. The stakes were so much higher now. I knew that my anger risked marking my children, in body and spirit, even horribly disfiguring our relationship. The Indian philosopher Shantideva, never one to mince words, reflects in The Way of the Bodhisattva: “Good works gathered in a thousand ages. A single flash of anger, shatters them.” 

Shantideva would have had some things to say about what had happened in that bathroom.

One night, in the midst of another heated and quickly escalating conflict with my son, I escaped to the bathroom and closed the door. Every one of my muscles was coiled and tense, driving for action; my ears were ringing with the furious accusations racing around inside my skull. I found myself shuddering and shaking, gasping for breath. It was not unlike the final stage of labor where your body feels as if it is being cleaved entirely in two. But I stayed where I was. I sat with it. The fury blazed in full and eventually abated. The arrow of Mara had passed through me and left a flower of insight.

To be really angry is to experience a radical contraction of the self. It narrows the vast infinity of awareness to the very tightest clutching of I want and I don’t want. And for me it was at that very moment of most extreme contraction that the door into emptiness and impermanence dropped open. The teachings of no-self suddenly became intimate. Not in a place of calm on the zafu as I had imagined they might, but in hot furious tears sitting on the edge of the bathtub. Anger was pointing its giant red neon sign at where I most strongly divided the world into self and other, right and wrong, him and me.

This flash of realization was powerful. But it was not enough to dissolve the habits of a lifetime, and I didn’t have lifetimes to play with: there was still an angry child on the other side of that bathroom door demanding his playstation. I had to leave the bathroom, get up off the zafu each morning, and keep on parenting. To help me bring wisdom and compassion to the intensity of family life I came to understand that my practice needed something more than “just sitting.”

Pema Chödrön’s book Practicing Peace stood on the bookstore shelf like a little blue flag marking a great treasure: dig here. The book introduced me to the Tibetan practice of tonglen, which offers a way of working directly with the painful sensations of aggression. This practice of “sending and receiving” gently but powerfully strengthened the insight I had in the bathroom that night—that there is no fundamental separation of self and other. The final step in tonglen is practicing for all sentient beings who have known this pain, underscoring that the experience of rage, however shameful it may feel, does not make us monsters but is part of our rich, messy, human inheritance. 

Pema also wrote about practicing the paramita of patience as an antidote to anger. So from my Australian living room I signed up for an online course on the paramitas, offered by Pema Chödrön and given to her students at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia. Paramita is a Sanskrit word meaning “perfection” and traditionally there are six qualities that encourage the perfection of character. Pema shared an excellent mnemonic to help remember them:

Gosh — Generosity
Darn — Discipline
Please — Patience
Eat — Enthusiasm
My — Meditation
Pizza — Prajna (wisdom)

Reassuringly (as “perfection” can feel way out of the realm of possibility), Pema emphasized that it is effort, stretching beyond our habitual ways of acting, that allows these qualities to flower.

I had never given much attention to patience, mistaking it for meekness or repression. But I discovered that patience is a discipline and a commitment like no other. Shantideva again: “No evil is there like anger. No austerity to be compared to patience.” While anger is all about the misguided urge to control, patience is a willingness to be with whatever is as it is. Patience can demand the most determined effort, especially when the habits of irritation and anger have built up over a lifetime or more, yet it is enlivened by the sweetest of qualities, such as humor, lightness, and perspective.

In seeking to cultivate patience I am constantly learning to pay attention to my body off the cushion. The sensation of rage is so physical that taking care of anger often means directly addressing the body: cooling my face with ice, exhaling all the way to my toes, or placing my hand on my heart. It also asks that I pay attention to the wider physical context: am I getting enough sleep, enough food, enough quiet? Working with the body in this way has the great added benefit of bypassing the storylines that fuel fury: He never listens! I can’t handle this!

It is nearly three years now since that night with my son in the bathroom. Through expanding my ways of practicing, life at home has become calmer for all of us. At 11 my son is curious, smart and kind. He is also quick to anger. I could blame myself for that, for the hot blood I passed to him through example or the hidden workings of genetics. But my intimacy with anger also means I can help. I have walked that path, hung on to that cliff. He doesn’t need to feel abandoned to the intensity of those feelings or lost in shame in their aftermath. We can burn that karma together. All beings awakening as one. Right here in the bathroom, and everywhere.

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Bill Cosby was found guilty last week of three counts of aggravated indecent assault after more than 50 women came forward and accused him of sexual abuse. I am thrilled to see justice done. But I also wanted to watch him suffer. I discovered this desire the other day during a moment of distraction. And I learned how short the distance is between my enemy and myself.

Here’s what happened. I was at my laptop, gathering documents for a new project. In the upper righthand corner of my screen, a CNN alert read, “Breaking News.” I clicked on it. The headline said, “Watch Cosby Accusers React to Verdict.” I misread it, thinking it said, “Watch Cosby React to Verdict.” I clicked. There was an ad from the furniture store Raymour & Flanigan, then the promised video clip. It was of the accusers exiting the courtroom, crying, hugging each other. I felt hoodwinked. I didn’t want to see that. I wanted to watch Bill Cosby react to the verdict. I wanted to watch him suffer.

Related: The Death of Eido Roshi, Problematic Pioneer

This is not how I had imagined I would behave when I started practicing meditation in 1999. But since then, I’ve learned that meditation is not about sitting in a spare Japanese garden with a flute playing in the distance, eyes closed, mind still. It’s about sitting in your own skin right in the middle of chaos. Eyes open, you observe the maelstrom of your mind without rewriting it or running away. It’s about knowing what you’re doing as you’re doing it. And it’s about coming back to the present with compassion once you realize your mind has drifted away.

So here’s my story again—this time in slow-motion:

1. I was at work, doing a job that required concentration and focus.
2. The “breaking news” notification slid into the upper righthand corner of my screen. Back in the day, if you saw those words, it meant, “Something Really Important Has Just Happened.” A major disaster or political revolution. Now “breaking news” is just a five-second video of President Trump flicking dandruff off French President Emmanuel Macron’s shoulder. So old habits led me to click on the “breaking news.”
3. I misread the headline as saying, “Watch Cosby React to Verdict.” I imagined that he had blown up and yelled at the prosecutor. I wanted to see that. I wanted to see Bill Cosby squirm. He’s the enemy, after all. And that’s part of how I locate myself in the world—better than Cosby, worse than the Dalai Lama.
4. Now I had to watch an ad for Raymour & Flanigan. It wasn’t even one the ads that I could skip after four seconds; I had to watch the whole thing to get to my revenge fix. (It wasn’t lost on me—even in my frenzied state—that a business was capitalizing on my greed for suffering, to sell me an easy chair.) Like a dog barely able to contain herself in the presence of a treat, I kept my eyes on the screen. For a split second, I registered what I was doing and considered going back to work. I thought, Do you need to see this right now? Do you need to see it at all? Ever? But then the video started playing, and my emerging consciousness flamed out.
5. The women came out of the courtroom sobbing, hugging one another. I kept watching, thinking that the part I wanted part was coming (Cosby yelling at the prosecutor). I waited. Yadayada, whatever, women crying, OK. And then it was over. Wait, what? Thinking I must’ve clicked on the wrong headline, I went over to YouTube to search for the clip. Nothing.
6. Finally, I slowed down and reread the headline. Upon a moment of reflection, I could see more clearly what had just happened, and I was disappointed in myself. I let myself get distracted, didn’t read carefully, tried to feed my craving for schadenfreude, and then looked past the suffering of others for the sake of satisfying that desire. I felt helpless in the face of the addictive nature of it all.

Related: Having Real Conversations (Even with My Sister)

Sitting at my laptop, I just wanted what I wanted, and I didn’t care about anything else. I didn’t care about my work. I didn’t care about the sobbing victims. I just wanted one thing, and I was pissed when I didn’t get it. But here’s the thing. Bill Cosby wanted what he wanted. He didn’t care about anything else. He certainly didn’t care about his victims. He was a version of me out there. I recognized him. I recognized myself in him. And in doing so, I was jolted awake.

I have no control over him, or what the rest of the country does with him. But I do have some agency around my own choices. And for me, meditation is a pathway to awakening. When I meditate, I watch the circus play out in my head. I catch myself giving rise to all the negativity that keeps showing up in my life. I stay in the room with everything I see. I practice not running away from my indifference toward the victims. I practice not grasping at the schadenfreude. I see it, but I don’t run toward or away from it. I get familiar with how the mind works. I hold hands with my worst impulses and keep them where I can see them.

Related: Shambhala International Owns Up to Past Abuse

Every day, my intent is to look inward without flinching. Lately, I’ve had to smile at the lengths to which I go to look good to myself. But when I decide to just be with myself instead, a different gateway opens. I see how the circus of rage, superiority, and judgment is just another invitation to come back home and breathe. And every time I do that, I stand on firmer ground for when I go to take action. Make no mistake—action is needed. Desperately. But without first recognizing what’s happening in the moment, I’m prone to becoming the very thing I’m trying to stop.

This time, I stopped myself at the end of my distraction and reflected on my desire to watch Cosby suffer. I can’t promise I won’t feel that way again. But maybe next time, I can stop myself a little bit earlier.

The post I Wanted to Watch Bill Cosby Suffer appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Buddhists often shame each other for experiencing anger. But getting in touch with our anger is vital. 

If we aim to engage destructive social structures, as we must, our efforts will bring us into direct relationship with anger and outrage. At its worst, anger burns us up, injures others, or, when we repress it, collapses us into depression. In the spiritual realm, it can also become passive aggression, which either internalizes as the hyper-energized inner critic or projects out onto those who are “not following the rules.”

Related: Soothing the Hot Coals of Rage

Women in particular—who are socialized over millennia to be accommodating, nice, pretty, and enabling—are shamed when they express anger. Rather than shaping themselves into pretzels in service of distorted and immature power—which leaves them muted, manipulative, frustrated, damaged, and damaging—women can recognize outrage at its root: the activated energy experienced in their bodies. This energy, when distilled into clarity and wisdom, burns away the dross of self-seeking desires and fears. It cuts through one’s subtle addiction to transcendent, calm states—an addiction all too common among dharma practitioners.

In the realms of Buddhist iconography and practice, we see the dynamic force of fierce feminine energy represented in the Vajrayana school, particularly in the female image of Vajrayogini. Known as the “Essence of all Buddhas,” she is depicted in a dancing posture similar to that of Shiva. She wields a sharp knife symbolic of her ability to cut through ignorance and illusions. Her hair is untamed and her face radiates a numinous, wrathful expression. She is wild. Her red body is ablaze with the heat of yogic fire and is surrounded by the flames of wisdom.

This portrayal signifies the gift of the protector feminine. If we are to undertake the blessed and grueling journey of the luminous, fierce, yet tender heart needed for our times, then anger is an asset. Looking on at the mindless destruction of the planet, how can we not feel outraged? While anger is an uncomfortable and difficult emotion, it serves a vital purpose. It shocks us out of the stupid trivia of celebrity lifestyles and media dirges. We should be on a war footing, in the same way we might in the face of an alien invasion. Instead we are lost in distracted twaddle while a terrible destruction unfolds around us.

It is healthy to feel angry and enraged that the boreal forests of Canada are being stripped to make way for tar sands mining, to feel angry that the fossil fuel companies are determined to extract the last drops of oil, gas, and coal, whatever the environmental and human cost. Our anger tells us they are absolutely not to be trusted. They do not have our collective welfare at heart. Instead they funnel billions of dollars into campaigns and advertisements that misinform the public about the actual state of the planet.

It is important to feel upset, remorse, and anger at what humans have done. It means we have a conscience. In Buddhist understanding, the force of conscience is the guardian of the world.

It is important to let ourselves feel outrage rather than sanitize this raw emotion with spiritual speak or shame it as ignoble. Yet if we harbor or act out of anger, it almost always poisons us, diminishing our credibility and harming others. The late Thai Buddhist teacher Ajahn Chah recommended we “catch emotions in the net of mindfulness, and then examine them before reacting.” Anger is a warning that something is invading and overwhelming us. If we don’t take heed, disorder and destruction will follow.

Holding onto anger, however, is not sustainable. There is a fine line between feeling anger and being blinded by its energy. Anger can sometimes arise when we activate early patterning. This kind of upset needs careful tending.

Anger as a healthy response to injustice has a different quality. It is clarifying. In Buddhist teachings, particularly in Vajrayana Buddhism, so-called negative emotions mask pure essential energy. Once the coarser emotion is transmuted, the finer energy is distilled.

Anger is traditionally thought to be close to wisdom. When not projected outward onto others or inward toward the self, it gives us the necessary energy and clarity to understand what needs to be done.

If we prematurely condemn or repress anger because we think it unworthy to feel, then we will fail to transform it. The fullness of its embodied energy will remain unavailable to us. We won’t be able to protect what needs to be protected; we will let what is most precious slip away.

♦

From Time to Stand Up by Thanissara, © 2015 Sacred Activism, an imprint of North Atlantic Books.

[This story was first published in 2015]

The post Don’t Worry, Be Angry appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

My teacher, Shwe Oo Min Sayadaw, would come into the dharma hall once every morning during one of the sitting sessions. He would make some brief, very pithy comments that I would love and found very helpful in my practice.

One particular morning when he came in and began to talk, I was straining to tune into his words, as his voice was very soft and low-pitched. I was on the right side of the dharma hall, and my teacher was at the front and to my left. On my right, outside of the dharma hall, was a path that villagers used as a shortcut through the monastery. While we were all sitting quietly and listening to Sayadawgyi, a sudden noise erupted from the direction of the path outside. I felt heat rise, and anger started to burn in my chest. “Who is making all that damn noise?” I thought. I was straining to hear my teacher and tune into his words, but to no avail. The anger was beginning to erupt, and I was ready to cut loose.

Amid all this turmoil and chaos, a question emerged in my mind. “What is happening?” I had been so peaceful and meditative a moment ago, and suddenly there was chaos. This piqued my interest, and I began to watch my mind. I saw it racing to the left to listen to Sayadawgyi and then racing to the right to curse and swear at the imbeciles who were causing the ruckus outside; then it raced again to the left because I wanted to hear my teacher’s words so much, but I could not. I was so angry. Where was the calm that was there just minutes ago? What was happening inside?

This wanting to know and investigate what was happening in my mind was right thinking (samma-sankampa). Then came the realization: there was attachment to the sound to my left, as well as monumental aversion to the sounds on my right and the idiots outside. After this realization, I saw that sound is just sound. When this was understood, there was no longer clinging to my teacher’s words or aversion to the noise outside. Both were just sounds, nature. Understanding this, the mind became centered and calm.  

From this episode, I also realized a formula, which I gave a name: the pendulum formula. When the mind is attached to any experience, even to the smallest degree, and another experience thwarts or interrupts the first one, aversion will arise to match the degree of attachment. So if there is 65 degrees of attachment, there will instantly be 65 degrees of aversion, and so on.

This is how meditation happens: with interest and inquiry. If you are ready when defilements arise, the lesson will come and you will understand fully. The role of awareness is the gathering of data. In the incident above, there was a sudden desire to know. Awareness played the role of knowing everything that was happening. It knew the mind agitated and going back and forth; it knew all the feelings and activities in the body and mind.

When we have enough data for the problem at hand, the solution will always come. When mindfulness is absent, we can only be aware of gross-level objects. Right now we have awareness and stability of mind, but is this a gross or subtle level of awareness? Sharp awareness can see the inner workings of the mind, but partial awareness will never see the causes that are present. When we go from a gross level to a subtle level, we can say conditions are complete. This is when we can understand the nature of our minds.

From When Awareness Becomes Natural by Sayadaw U Tejaniya ©2016 by Sayadaw U Tejaniya. Photographs ©2016 Zack Hessler. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. www.shambhala.com

The post Dissecting Anger in the Dharma Hall appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Jules Shuzen Harris, Sensei is the author of the article “Uprooting the Seeds of Anger” in the Summer 2012 issue of Tricycle. A dharma heir of Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, Shuzen is a priest in the Soto Zen tradition, a member of the White Plum Asangha, the Zen Peacemakers Order, and the American Zen Teachers Association. He is also a practicing psychotherapist who fuses traditional Western methods with Zen teachings. He is the Vice Abbot of Soji Zen Center in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania—and has two black belts, in kendo and iaido, so look out!

I spoke with Shuzen on the topic of dealing with our anger on May 24th. As it happened, he had given a radio interview on a similar topic (but with a much better interviewer) not long before. It’s called “Resolving Anger in the Family,” and you can find it here, on the Soji Zen Center site.

—Phil Ryan

The post Uprooting the Seeds of Anger with Jules Shuzen Harris appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Today we have a guest post from Leonard Scheff, co-author with Susan Edmiston of the book The Cow in the Parking Lot: A Zen Approach to Overcoming Anger. Read about his views on dealing with anger and then let us know: What do you think of the assertion that “being angry at an event is judging the universe to be unacceptable”?

The Dalai Lama said that overcoming anger is the front gate to enlightenment. Generally we become angry because something that happened or didn’t happen wasn’t the way we wanted. However to deal with anger on a more basic level, it is necessary to look at its effect in a broader context.  The Buddha said:

You shouldn’t chase after the past
or place expectations on the future.
What is past is left behind.
The future is as yet unreached.
Whatever quality is present
you clearly see right here, right there.
Not taken in, unshaken,
that’s how you develop the heart.
Ardently doing what should be done today.
                            —Majjhima Nikaya (131)

When we become angry it is tempting to “chase the past” by getting caught up in irrelevant questions like “Did he intend to injure me?” or “Why did she insult me?” In other words, you want to know what in the other person’s life caused them to refuse to comply with what you thought should happen.  However basically, being angry at an event is judging the universe to be unacceptable. 

If you are going driving down the street and going through a green light when a driver running a red light crashes into you, it is likely an occasion for anger.  After such events, people are heard to ask something like, “Why me?” or “Oh lord, what did I do to deserve this?”  If you look at the errant driver’s immediate past, you might discover that he had a violent argument with his wife and his dangerous driving was propelled by his anger.  That would give you the immediate cause of his conduct.  It doesn’t however answer the question of why you showed up at that intersection at the precise moment that resulted in the crash. 

After the Indonesian tsunami that killed about 230,000 men, women and children in 2004, a Buddhist monk was asked how Buddhism would explain an unimaginable tragedy like that.  His answer was, “Because.”  That is the Buddhist answer to why anything happens: simply, “Because!” It reflects Buddhism’s strict view of cause and effect. The Song of Zazen says: “Cause and effect are one, not two, not three, the path is straight.”   This means that everything that has ever happened is the cause of the event that provoked your anger. From the big bang, to the first amoeba doggy paddling across the slime, to the dinosaurs, the extinction of the dinosaurs, Columbus (or whoever) discovering America, what you did yesterday and in the last minute, all led up to, for instance, someone injuring or insulting you, which has lead to your being angry. All that has ever happened funnels down to this moment.  In my case, the events of my life and before have resulted in my typing this page. In your case it results on your reading this page.  Whatever it is happened because of what went before for literally billions of years. If you ask me to explain what led to me writing this article I might say that it’s because I attended the Dalai Lama’s 1993 teaching in Tucson.  However it would also be correct to say that the Chinese are responsible for my writing this book because the Chinese invaded Tibet causing the Dalai Lama to flee and become available to the world. 

To deal with your anger and avoid this pointless inquiry, you need to understand that every time you are angry and want to indentify one or more immediate cause or causes you are disregarding all the rest of the history of the universe. The immediate cause of the person crashing into you might be useful in permitting you to obtain compensation for your losses.  However it has nothing to do with dealing with your anger.  Again, it is everything that has ever happened that has left you angry.  To the extent that you make the judgment that the occurrence was unfair or unreasonable and thus produced your angry reaction, you are, in effect, doing battle with the universe.  The odds for your winning that battle are not good.

Does This Mean That We Have No Control Over The Things That Will Happen To Us In The Future?

Fortunately this does not mean that what happens next in your life is also determined by what went before. Buddhism recognizes that there is an exceedingly, perhaps an unbelievably rare, event in the history of the universe which allows  an escape from determinism.  I have good news for you.  Since you are reading this article, it means that you have won the great cosmic lottery which allows you to possess human intelligence. Winning the cosmic lottery is so rare that winning the ordinary lotteries of this world, by comparison, seems like a sure thing.

Therefore you may be able to use your intelligence to seek to change future events in grand or subtle ways to prevent the reoccurrence.  By definition intelligence, as opposed to instinct, allows you to choose how you react to the events that are before you.  Intelligence is basically the power of choice. The simple truth is that when you are angry the use of your intelligence is severely limited and, if you are acting out of habit, perhaps non-existent.  So now that you know that you have won the ultimate lottery prize, you may want to decide that being angry and unaware is a silly way to waste it. While you can’t expect to change the entire universe, you do have a considerable ability to change what will occur in your future. By not acting out of anger and acting with awareness, and thereby using the full power of your intelligence, you increase the odds that the events of the future will be more to your liking. 

Another thing we can do in the present moment is to prevent the reoccurrence of something that occasioned our anger is to accept our responsibility, in whole or in part, for the incident.  If you were fired from your job, you may rise up in righteous indignation, believing that you bear no responsibility in the matter.  That may be true if an asteroid strikes you, but in the more mundane world, your conduct always bears some responsibility for the undesirable result. This is a hard issue to deal with because you may not be aware of your conditioned response or your habitual conduct that contributed to the problem. Perhaps worse yet, if you are aware of your habits or that you have a conditioned response, you may believe that’s beneficial and see no reason to change.  It is generally difficult to acknowledge that the beliefs underlying our actions may not be in our best interests.  To the extent that you deny that your conduct was at least a partial cause of the event, you are increasing the odds that it will happen again. The same result will occur over and over again until you acknowledge your responsibility. As Einstein said, “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.”

Change may not come as fast as you like.  After all, you are dealing with at least a few billion years of causation. Nonetheless, you can, by changing the way you deal with the present, have some power to affect what will happen to you in the future.  This requires that you use the occasion to escape the conditioning or habitual conduct that may have put you in the unacceptable situation. If your previous mate walked out on you, you may find it helpful in preventing a repeat performance to change your method or criteria for choosing a mate.  Again, when you act out of anger, the likelihood of changing your pattern of conduct and thus what will happen in your life is unnecessarily small. That is when the anger switch is turned to “on,” you view each of your habits as sacrosanct and reject any notion that you should change any of them. As long as we believe our anger has a beneficial effect, we will continue to be at war with the universe, which only by unusual coincidence may behave in accordance with our illusory mental view of how things should be.  We are like gamblers who know that the odds are against them but convince themselves that somehow they are exempt from the inevitable result.

Appreciating the Universe

Instead of waging war with the universe by being angry we can consider appreciating the universe.  The question is not whether you like what is happening but whether you understand that what has happened is past and not subject to change. If someone has done something that occasioned your anger, you may be able to get an apology or even compensation from that person, but that does not change the fact that the offending event occurred.

There are grotesque injustices abounding in the world right now—killing, starvation, torture, poverty—but they are all a product of the billions of years that have gone before. Again you can use your intelligence to try to change what it is you don’t like now for the future. But if your attempt to change the future is to only be angry at what happening, it inhibits the use of that intelligence and thus makes the change you seek less likely to occur. 

So to the extent you reserve the right to judge what has happened, you are impeding your progress toward a spiritual and calm abiding.  The problem for many of us is that somehow we give more attention to the things that we don’t like and pay little or no attention to the blessings that we have.  So how can we break out of this cycle and be willing to appreciate the universe for its blessings even when we don’t like what is happening to us? We can seek to come to terms with the problems befalling us by developing the heart and by living a kind and compassionate life. Joseph Campbell said, “Spirituality is an appreciation of the universe.”  That means that not only do you appreciate, mountains, waterfalls and sunsets, but you appreciate whatever it is that is happening now to you or around you as a manifestation of the universe whether you like it or not.

In order to fully appreciate the universe, we need to be aware of its blessings. One such blessing is the fact that we exist and are conscious of that fact and that alone is something to be grateful for.  We can then realize that for billions of years of titanic events of unimaginable and frequently destructive proportions some how our planet has come through in a form that allowed organic forms of life to come into existence.  In fact, we live in an incredibly small window in the universe where life can occur and that window has been open for sufficient time to allow that life to evolve into intelligent life.

We can balance the feeling that the universe is not dealing fairly with us by contemplating the dance of gravity and centrifugal force that allowed galaxies to form containing the controlled source of energy that is the sun that allows the formation of life on a tiny dot in the vast sea of the universe.  We can think about the anomaly that only two substances, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen dioxide, aka water, expand when they go from a liquid state to a solid—thus causing ice to have a lower specific gravity than water and thus float rather than sink.  The general opinion is that if water contracted on freezing, life as we know it on earth would not exist or exist in a far different form because ice would sink to the bottom of the oceans, ponds and streams and the result would be that the earth would be a much colder place. Or we can be angry at the driver ahead of us that keeps putting on his brakes for no apparent reason.

You can contemplate a leaf which has the ability to absorb the energy from the sun and thus provide food, clothing and shelter for us.  As it says in Torei Zenzi’s The Bodhisattva’s Vow:

With this realization, our noble ancestors, possessed of compassionate minds and hearts, gave tender care to bird and beast. And in our own daily lives we, too, should be reverently grateful for the protections of life: our food, drink and clothing.

Yes there may be catastrophes that befall us far greater than our everyday problems which can make anger seem a reasonable response. When those things befall us, we can be angry, or consider ourselves a victim or a martyr, or we can be like Jean-Dominique Bauby who ended up in an iron lung, all but completely paralyzed.  He found his state satisfactory and managed to write the book, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly using only the blinking of his left eye to indicate when an assistant pointed at the proper letter.  Or we can go back to feeling incapacitated because our toe hurts. 

It is true that within that window in the universe where we live has rough edges that take life such as earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, floods and so on.  However the reality of the danger in this world was expressed by Edward Gibbon:

Man has much more to fear from the passion of his fellow creatures than from all the convulsions of nature.
—History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1781, Volume II, Chapter XXVI, Part I.

We can see how our unawareness and conditioning of individuals is projected outward to restrain our progress to a better society.  History is full of wars, oppression and slaughter resulting from pernicious stupidity. “Can you imagine the damage that would be done if women and blacks were allowed to vote?”  “Next you’ll want equal rights for women and blacks?” The first doctor to suggest that surgeons should wash their hands before operating was the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis. He was ridiculed and only received recognition for his insight after his death.  The first person in England to translate the Bible into English, William Tyndale, was burned at the stake for his efforts.  Our history, and indeed the present is full of long lasting wars  resulting from powerful people who choose to enforce their illusory view of the world with the resources at their disposal.

The Choice

We can begin to benefit all sentient beings by learning to deal with our most destructive emotion, anger.  We have just come out of the twentieth century which proved Gibbon right.  In  the twentieth century  humans slaughtered humans by the tens of millions. With all of our improvement in understanding the world around us and the benefits of technology, we remain at the mercy of these destructive emotions.

If you conclude that anger is the proper response to things that we don’t like and thus if you still want to do battle with the universe, then ask yourself how that will benefit your and if you want to continue to suffer because you have taken on an impossible task.  Or you can following the teachings of the Buddha and turn your anger into compassion for the benefit of all sentient beings.

Image from www.pluralistnation.com

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