One of the biggest impurity of the mind is anger. This is an impurity which is omnipresent. It is present in every living being whether it is human or animal or bird. Whether that living being is a just born soul or a soul which is just going to leave the body in which he has spent its lifetime. Everyone of this living being has anger in their mind. And like I said previously it is omnipresent.
So how does this anger manifest in living beings. For the sake of simplicity and since I belong to the same species I will consider the example of humans here. The anger is manifested by our unfulfilled desire. We discussed desire in the previous article. Any desire which does not get fulfilled give rise to anger. Lets say for example as a parent we get angry at our children. We ask a child to do a task or ask a child not to do a certain thing which in our opinion could be bad for the child. If the child does not obey us then we take form of a monster and beat our child black and blue or shout at them. But in this case are we real concerned about whether the child has done or not done what we asked him to do. No, we get angry on the child because our desire that child should do what we ask him to do is unfulfilled. Take the example of a costly gadget which we have been thinking of buying for a long time. And by the time we gather enough funds for the gadget, it becomes unavailable in the market. What happens once we realise it, we become angry, frustrated and agitated and start doing things which are not in our true nature.
What happens when one gets angry ?
Does one who gets angry does he realise how he is behaving ? When one gets angry the person or even an animal react in almost the same way. When it comes to humans, the first thing which happens when they angry is that they lose discrimination power. That is they cannot differentiate between right and wrong. They lose their intellectual power and since intellect is the primary difference between humans and animals, humans become animals when they get angry. In case of anger the judgement which they make gets clouded and it may result in disaster. The moment one gets angry, one will start saying things which he does not mean to say when he is in a calmer mode. he will start shouting. His tone will be monstrous and the choice of words he will use will be devilish. He will have no control over his tongue and the thoughts would be not in sync with his body. It doesn’t matter who is infront of him, if he is small or big, he will unleash himself on that person. He will do things with his limbs which would not have done in case he was calmer. I am sure everyone must have come across many examples of people losing their control over themselves when they encounter such situation.
What happens afterwards ?
The bout of anger may be a short term or long term. One may get angry for few seconds and another may stay angry for couple of days or even years. But one thing is common in both situation is that there is very high chance of regret. Take an example of a situation where a person is driving a vehicle. He wants to reach at a place at a specific time. This is his desire. To fulfil that desire he is driving his vehicle recklessly. He comes to a point where another vehicle brushes against his vehicle. There is a scratch mark on his vehicles door. He gets angry and get down from the vehicle. Goes to the vehicle who damaged his vehicle and starts abusing the driver of the vehicle. Both of them get angry and start hitting each other. In this melee the other person gets injured and police had to be called. The police take the injured person to the hospital and other guy to the police station and charges him with relevant sections. In all this he could not reach the place in time. He ends up in police lockup. His family visit him and his children see him in lockup and both the person and the family breaks down in this situation. At the end what happens to the person and what does he feel after this episode. REGRET. He feels extremely regretful for his actions and blames his bout of anger for putting him in this place. Most of us who go through this situation end up feelign regret. A regret of why did I let my anger take over my senses. Why did I behave in such a manner.
Reaction vs Response
Another important point to note in case of anger is that we do not respond to the situation. We react to the situation. The reaction is mostly spontaneous without we giving any thought to its consequences. There is a term in english called as knee jerk reaction. It is the first way of reacting to anything and does not end up in a pleasant way. Instead of reacting what we should be doing is responding to the situation. In the above example where there was a slight mishap, the driver whose car got scratched reacted to the situation and it soon went out of hand. Whereas what he should have done is responded to the situation where he should have taken the details of the person and copy of insurance and moved ahead. After he finished his task he should have gone to the vehicles service centre and should have got the vehicle repaired. The cost of which would be borne by the third party cover of the insurer. This would have been responding to the situation and he wouldnt have falled into the mess he eventually fell in.
So how do we avoid getting angry ?
One of the best ways to avoid getting angry is to reduce the flow of thoughts. We are driven by multiple number of thoughts and many of those thoughts are absolutely unnecessary. In today’s corporate language it is called as overthinking. This also refers to engaging in activities where we dont have any business. Typical example of this is unnecessary gossip which we do many times a day which is not productive. When our mind is stressed out with thoughts which is beyond its capacity some of them are going to cause trouble to us and more often that not they end up making us angry. Another method is to count from 1 to 10 when we get angry and by the time we reach 10 the anger would have subsided. In this case it is important that we realise when we get angry.
Controlling ones anger is not a one day exercise, it takes a lot of practice and time before we can master the art of anger management. But one thing is critical is that consistently one needs to practice how to manage anger.