QUESTION
Dear Robina,
I have really struggled replacing anger with something else (compassion) for constructive action in the world and life. Do you have any practical resources to follow up on this?
All the best,
J
ANSWER
Well, J: that’s a big question! Wide open, too.
I’d talked about this in my blog of April 18 this year, so I’ll quote from some of it.
So often our trouble, I think, in our culture is that our compassion is fairly sentimental, you know? Usually, it’s just for the innocent victims: the little doggy, the child who gets hurt; that’s about it, really. I mean, we’re very limited in our compassion. Someone needs to be an innocent victim in order todeserve our compassion. If we see a person punch someone, and then the other person punches them back, we won’t have compassion for either of them. We’ve got to have a person who’s a victim and then someone to blame.
In other words, our view of suffering is limited and therefore our compassion.
But the Buddha’s view is there are subtler levels of suffering: we all suffer, he says, because we have attachment and the other delusions: we’re all the victims of our own unhappy states of mind: the very having of them is a deep level of suffering.
We like to point the finger at somebody who we think caused these states of mind and then try and get ourselves off the hook: “Well, I’m allowed to be this way.” If we stop doing that, then we can begin to recognize what’s causing our misery: the delusions themselves.
Once we decide to own our anger, our jealousy, our depression, with humility, and realize, “Yes, this is causing me pain, yes, these are my problems” – no need for guilt, just owning them, humbly – the more we can see that this is what is breaking my heart. This is a really powerful step in our practice.
When we begin to see this, we’ll then realize we’re all in the same boat: we’re all neurotic; we all suffer from our own rubbish.
This doesn’t mean that bad things don’t happen; this doesn’t mean our boyfriend wasn’t mean to us; this doesn’t mean that people aren’t mean to us – that’s not being discussed here. This is looking at our own unhappy states of mind, and recognizing – this is the point now – that anything we’ve ever done to harm anybody, since we were tiny, is coming from these unhappy states of mind.
Then we’ll start to see that this is why we harm others. It’s very courageous to look at this. We don’t, most of us, run around raping and killing too many people; we don’t jump on little girls all day; we’re not stealing and lying all day – but we’ve all done things to harm others. When we recognize that this is because of our delusions, our own misery, then we can understand why other people harm others as well.
This is really the basis for beginning to have compassion for people who are the troublemakers, for the harmers. This is a very difficult point for us, but when we understand it, the logic is clear.
And, of course, adding to this is the view of karma that says we’re all linked from many lifetimes, meeting again and again, being harmed and helped by each other again and again.
Things that happen aren’t just random events with no causes: this view is the very basis of anger. When we shift to the view of karma, it just naturally lessens anger.
And the other thing: giving up anger doesn’t mean we throw the baby out with the bathwater and don’t care. We’ll see the suffering of the world, we’ll know why it’s happening and then, like Martin Luther King said, we will say, “What can I do to help?”