Nov 12, 2020
Is Anger Truly Justifiable?
An “esoteric” view of anger
Anger is one of the most commonly felt emotions on Earth. Throughout our long history, some people have made it an ideal while others have avoided it at all costs. Our push and pull relationship with anger tells us a lot about its impact in our lives. Sometimes it feels right to get angry, to express this burning desire to explode in one way or another. Others, it doesn’t feel right to do so and yet, it’s so hard to resist it — we just can’t control it — and before we realize what has been done, it’s too late.
What is the purpose of anger? Why do we have to deal with such a complex emotion — is it just an animal instinct? A “noble” force? Is it primitive? Divine?
These are the many questions I’ve asked myself while sitting face to face with anger, an emotion that turned some men into gods and others into animals.
The root of anger
One of the many ways through which we deal with our feelings is repression, which means pushing down whatever we may feel as long as it does the job — this coping mechanism, so to speak, has been learned almost automatically because we had to deal with our feelings and no one taught us how because no one really knows, well, how.
Society as we know it today is the best at making people feel ashamed, imperfect, insecure and so on. What to do with all these confusing feelings? Escape them. How? By forgetting about them through whatever means possible whether it’s drinking, using drugs or whatever else.
The problem with this behavior is that the more we do it, the more of a stranger we become to ourselves — creating a huge bridge between us and our feelings. And what happens when we’re a stranger to ourselves? We get nervous anytime something brings us face to face with our feelings.
Just like any other emotions, anger is simply a form of energy. Most people are so unfamiliar with their feelings that they associate them with people, events or circumstances without being able to actually separate the feeling of anger itself as an example, and the object of their anger.
Whatever the emotion we feel, we have to learn to dissociate it in two parts:
- There is first the pure emotion itself which is raw energy
- And then the object of the emotion — which is created by us — the “victim” of our “blaming”
In and of itself, anger is just raw energy and depending on us, the “channels” — it is expressed in different ways.
If human beings have both a lower and a higher selves — their feelings do too.
In Astrology, anger is represented by the planet Mars, which rules the first sign of the zodiac, Aries — read that again: the first sign.
Anything labeled “first” needs a lot of energy, if you’ve been the first in anything, even once in your life — you know how much work it requires to get to that place. To be the first in one way or another means to generate a tremendous amount of energy — so much energy that it surpasses everything else. And this amount of energy can be felt through anger.
All emotions have different kinds of energy — while people associate anger with destruction and chaos — anger has also been used to defend people, causes, and create change in the world. This is a crucial part of anger that we often overlook because we’re either too busy judging others or ourselves for being angry.
Speaking about judging ourselves & others, our advances in society haven’t reached a satisfying place in which we can really grasp the nature of anger — as discussed earlier, anger like any other form of emotion is just energy — and compared to other emotions which manifest themselves through different ways— anger is a burst of energy, one that pushes us to find a target and hit it so to speak.
Even though most people believe there are only two ways to deal with anger, which are:
- Avoiding it through repression
- Let it control us and create chaos
By learning that anger is pure energy, which has been triggered because of some opposition in how we perceived/experienced life — we can master the skill of dissociating our anger (energy) from our unconscious need to objectify it (through a person, event or circumstance).
How to “surpass” or “transcend” your anger (Step-by-step)
Now that this has been explained. We come to the practical part. How to actually do it.
If you’ve ever wished to transcend your anger, the first step is to hold it right at the beginning of the “burst”. This happens almost instantly — something triggers you and right before your mind fools you into “blaming mode” — you stop it right there with the intention not to get angry because of something or someone.
Doing this forces your mind to change its automatic, unconscious program stating that anger should be expressed by blaming what’s outside ourselves.
External events may trigger your anger but they may not trigger someone else’s anger which means that you are the source of the anger and not what’s “out there”.
This process doesn’t have for purpose to justify the “bad” in the world but rather to teach you to become more familiar with your feelings and ultimately own them — an angry person who owns her anger is a walking master — and that’s rare to find nowadays.
I want you to take a moment and think about it, or if you like challenges, the next time you get angry — try pausing for some seconds and witness how your mind desperately seeks something to blame, a reason behind your anger and worse, how quickly the mind creates a “blueprint” to fulfill your desire to “correct” the world because that’s what we want to do when angry — in one way or another, we want to correct the world.
Just like a knife can be used to feed or make bleed — anger can be used to offend or defend. The secret behind anger lies in how much we’re able to reprogram our unconscious mechanisms — the ones that desperately try to blame the world or ourselves — and next, the channeling of this energy because once you’ve learned to stop objectifying your anger (detaching it from people and circumstances) — you’re left with this tremendous energy that you must deal with. What to do next?
If you’re aware of your body — meaning you know what’s going on within it — you might have realized that it has different sources of energy, and these sources are all connected — each level of energy express an emotion differently.
If anger starts from the lowest source of energy (lower is just a relative term — the first source of energy, the root chakra has the most energy because it is the “first” one), it is first expressed very primitively because of the raw energy.
But as this anger keeps on reaching higher sources of energy, it gets “purified” turning into a shield that protects instead of a spear that harms— of course this happens through your intention: the decision not to save yourself/escape reality by projecting your anger onto the world but rather — by owning the fact that you are angry and therefore becoming the master of this unlimited source of energy.
Final thoughts on anger
These writings come from personal experiences, they come from sitting face to face with anger itself — a profound and burning feeling of anger — and making the firm decision not to be “seduced ” by it through objectification, but rather deciding to own it, to be one with it and channel it in constructive ways.
They say that the teacher will come when the student is ready — most of the time — this teacher is life itself, pushing you to your limits until you decide to learn the lesson.
Even if this might sound counterintuitive — anger can be a form of love, a drive to protect, to defend, a drive to strive for a better condition for ourselves and for the world. At its highest expression, it is the tool of change, love in its most physical form.
