The Insanity of Anger
In a word… anger is insane. Why, you ask? What is it about anger that is so crazy, so inept, so incontrovertibly pointless and so doomed to contain within its presentation the corrupt and anguished seeds of its own doom? It’s really very simple. Anger is not real. It is not actually a real emotion. It is a meta-emotion, if even that is an appropriate designation for its putrid essence. It is an attempt to obfuscate sadness with another emotional state that is not even justifiable at all. Sadness, loss, pain, misery, despair, desolation and its final rendition - depression - now those emotions, those are very much real. They represent an abjectly incorrect viewpoint, but they are very much valid, correct and appropriate reactions from the perspective of the ego, for the illusion of the ego wants you to give up, to lay down and die, to finally succumb to the darkness of voracious and self-consuming despondency that the ego so very much believes to be the only possible outcome of your existence. But anger? Oh, no. Not at all. It’s not at all real. You see, you were taught to be angry. Go and find an angry baby. There is no such thing. No baby has ever been born into this world who was actually angry. Sad? Yes. Lonely? Absolutely. Terrified, tired, hungry, sleepy, confused, bewildered, unsure of its origin and desperately longing for the comfort of its parents? Yes, that’s all guaranteed - those babies have absolutely existed. But an angry one? A rageful, vicious, spiteful and vengeful baby? Nope. No way. Never in the history of all of time has this ever occurred and never will it ever, for no child is given from God to this world with anger in its heart. Anger is a meta-state of awareness. It is a presumed uptake of a new emotional state that serves only to so hopelessly obscure others that, given enough time and, sadly, enough belief in anger, the fabricated emotional resonance of anger overtakes the sadness, never covering it completely but simply resting on top of it so convincingly that the wearer of this new garment - this cloak of rage - truly becomes a person who believes that there might have ever been a justification for their contempt. No such reasoning or equivalency can actually be proposed, posited, effectively evidenced or actually and truly supported, for there is but joy in this world… or its apparent absence. The absence of joy is experienced as sadness. This is quite acceptable. How are you to know that joy has returned if there were not times, periods of respite, moments of doubt or areas of thought that failed to serve as effective representations of joy? How could you accurately envision, experience, remember and revel within joy if there were not at least brief moments in your life into which joy did not - apparently, but incorrectly - spill its golden light? Anger stands in the place of these absences, an attempt to obfuscate the joy that was once almost eternally present, the joy that you knew as a wee infant, so very much loved by your parents and cradled safely in their arms as they literally cared for all of your needs with graciousness, peace and great happiness because of your new presence in their lives. These earliest of memories form the bedrock and foundation of your awareness. As you grew older, you needed less of this care and you were increasingly able to attend to your own needs. This period did not necessarily entail any particular arising of resentment on your part, for you were beginning to explore your new world and you rested safely in the assumption that your parents would continue to provide for you as they had done so faithfully before. But there came a time when your will was thwarted. You were denied what you requested and you were displeased. This too is normal - it is not acceptable to allow a toddler, so fresh out of their helpless infancy, to have whatever they might desire for they have no knowledge of the dangers of this world and they are to be protected, simply because they still have no way of effectively protecting themselves. Yet this caused consternation on your part, for your developing mind had previously known no restrictions, whereas now they were being imposed and you had no previous experience upon which to draw a correlation that would explain this sudden and disheartening turn of events. And so… anger arose. Perhaps in a cute and childish form, a temper tantrum or other explosive expression of your displeasure at your individual will being denied. This too is quite normal. But this emotional state, this demanding now denied and this imperious request so bluntly ignored - this enraged you. So, you reacted. But your reaction was not at all justified. However, no sane person could possible assert that you should have, at that exact moment in your personal development, understood why it was that your particular focus of desire should be so vehemently denied to you. You were too young. Of course you could not understand. You did not realize at that time - unless you were a truly extraordinary being and in which case, you likely developed into a person who radically altered the world with your mere presence alone - that your nascent ego had already taken ahold of your mind, requesting what it wanted with no thought for why it might be that you could not have what it was that you so adamantly desired. Yet you were not given whatever is was you clamored for, and as a result, you suffered - or you believed that you did, which because you are the sole creator of your own reality, is functionally identical to the ego and to your mind… at least at that time. So, there you are. Crying miserably, horrifically upset, totally enraged and despondent in your pain, demanding what it is you wish and fully incapable of understanding why you cannot have it, so utterly confused by your parents who had previously attended to all of your needs without any qualm, quiver of uncertainty or inkling of hesitation. What a situation. What a calamity. What a seminal event in your life. And so… anger is born. But it is ineffective, unreasonable, pointless and useless. However to your infantile mind, it appeared to be a wholly appropriate reaction. This assumption, this dark delusion, this simple mistake - this you have carried with you ever since, reacting from rote behavioral patterns for years afterwards, at times literally regressing in your behavior to a juvenile or even truly infantile emotional baseline, simply because when this emotion first arrived in your mind, you both accepted and embraced it, just as it was, because it seemed - at the time - to be a wholly justifiable reaction to what had just occurred. But it never was. It was not correct, for what you could not have was either dangerous, inappropriate or unintended for your fragile and undexterous manipulations. Yet… you reacted, forming the basis of a deeply rooted assumption, a belief in denial where none existed, for it is quite likely that your first experience with anger long preceded your ability to rationally understand why you were so abruptly and uncategorically refuted and rebuffed when you simply wished to have what it is that you wanted, when you wanted it, and just as you wanted it. Why? Why did you react this way? Because it seemed appropriate to your developing ego, and so you did. Now, all of these many long years later, still you carry this first painful memory, still you suffer under the burden of its weight and still you cry out in vain to be given what you want - “damn it why can’t I have it” already you so hopelessly sputter - and still you react in a similar manner whenever something occurs that is not to your liking. Can you see that this is insane? Can you see that this is merely reactionary behavior that was ingrained because of experiences that occurred when you were so young that you likely have no conscious memory of their impression upon your rapidly developing mind? No parent with any earnest desire to protect their child would grant them access to dangerous toys. Neither would they allow them to play with animals that could hurt them, or allow them to wander into regions of this world that could harm them. That is not what parents do. Yet you wanted this. You wanted something that was forbidden - restricted from your world for good and sound reasons, yet you could not possibly be asked to grasp the enormity of what it was you wanted, for you were merely a babe in arms and you knew nothing of fear, for all you had known up until that point was love… just love, pure and simple love, and there had been nothing more than that that was your world. Then, suddenly, denial arrived and because your tiny amount of forming ego was not supplicated, anger arose. But can you see the insanity of projecting that first meta-emotion, that first combinatorial state in which wanting was so hopelessly intertwined with unavailability that your only possible reaction was to scream your rage at the blind universe that so dared to oppose your truly minuscule will? If you can delve deeply enough into your psyche to find this root cause, this poisoned fruit of the tree of requests so vehemently denied, then you can begin to heal this deepest of wounds. You can begin to accept that all rage, all anger, all frustration and all blindness stems from this first instance in which your ego was so opposed, and you can begin to untie this delusional knot of assumption, this presupposition that this world should always - and perhaps magically, for from the perspective of the infant, much of the world is magical indeed - somehow instantly and effortlessly bend itself to your will, providing you with what it is you want whenever you should so desire it to be as such. Anger is insane. It is a request for the fulfillment of desires that may not be at all appropriate for you. If you can resolve this insanity, you can begin to heal, which is equally to finally see that your will is not a force that the universe will automatically answer, for there is much more at play - and indeed at stake - than your simple panoply of desires and your assumption that their resolution should be so rapidly delivered just when it is that you desire that they must absolutely arrive.