|
Home -> Aaron -> ClassSeries -> 2009 -> Venture -> WeeklyWork
Venture Fourth Weekly Work
Week Twenty-Seven Sep 10, 2010
Dear
Venture Fourth friends,
Do
you have views around 9/11? I know I do. Here is a wonderful
opportunity to practice. There will probably be videos on TV of the
9/11 attack in the World Trade Center, maybe even of the other sites.
Normally I avoid these videos as they seem designed to bring up
righteous anger. This time I plan to watch with the questions, "What
is righteous anger? How does it relate to attachment?" The third
area of questioning for me is, "If there is no anger directed at an
"enemy", can there still be a sorrowful anger that we live in a
world in which such hatred exists; if so, what is the result of that
anger? What is the difference between anger at 'enemies' when 'I
am right' and compassionate anger? Can there be anger, as energy,
and compassion at the same time? What is the experience of
compassionate anger? How does it feel? What supports and deepens it?
What lessens compassion? "
When
we are not afraid of anger, can it be a catalyst for compassion? I am
pasting below Aaron's talk, "Anger as a Catalyst for Compassion,
from the book Presence, Kindness and Freedom.
I
see the book Ahimsa (Dynamic Compassion) [Paperback] by Daniel
Altman,
available on Amazon, with used copies as little as $1.19. Some of you
may like to read it. It's an old book. I first read it over 20
years ago. But it is still timely.
http://www.amazon.com/Ahimsa-Dynamic-Compassion-Altman/dp/083560537X
How
does such dynamic compassion help us release views and stay more
centered with strong emotion? How can we best cultivate such
compassion? Hatred blocks it, of course, and attachment to views, but
what are the near enemies? I'm not going to write my experience
here but ask you to look for yourselves.
With
love, Barbara
Anger as a Catalyst for Compassion
Q: Please talk about anger.
Is our anger ever useful? If not, how do we get rid of it? It seems
that without righteous anger, we'd let many more social problems go
unsolved.
Your anger is not good or bad,
it's just anger. Let's start with that. Anger contains energy
that can be transformed into skillful and loving action, but first
you must understand your dislike of experiencing anger or any heavy
emotion.
You ask, "Isn't anger bad
in itself? When I'm angry, I give off negative energy, and that can
hurt people." That is true; when you're angry, you do give off
negative energy. Are you going to stop the arising of negative energy
in yourself by saying, "I'm bad to be angry"? Can you stop a
river from flowing? Can you stop a cloud's movement across the
sky?.
You can control the flow of
reaction toward another, but can you shut off the feeling of anger in
yourself, really get rid of it? Or do you merely suppress it? In
terms of energy flow, if you suppress it, it's just as present;
it's simply hidden beneath the surface. Yes, it would be skillful
to transform it into positive energy, but such transformation will
never happen through judgment and suppression. As long as you try to
rid yourself of your anger, you are still controlled by that anger.
It is not helpful to feel you
must eradicate all anger, greed, jealousy, or pride, because as long
as you are in a human body, there will be catalysts that arouses
those emotions. I'm not suggesting that you simply allow anger or
greed in and act upon it. Can you develop a different relationship to
them? There are more than two choices. You need neither to act upon
them nor to suppress them; just bring gentle awareness to them.
When someone speaks or acts in
such a way that anger arises in you, can you stop and look? What is
this anger? Ask, "Does it relate only to the catalyst or does it
also relate to my dislike of this emotional turmoil in myself?" It
is so inconvenient and uncomfortable to experience anger. In your
slang, it pushes all your buttons. You fear you'll be driven to act
on that emotion, and with that fear, you judge yourself as if you had
already acted. Do you see that judgment? Another way to ask the
question is this: is the anger related wholly to the catalyst or is
part of the anger about the fact that there is unwanted discomfort
that came to you through what this person said or did? He or she left
rocks in the road, and it made your cart lurch. You wanted a smooth
ride.
The issue of suppression
versus reaction versus simple awareness leading to wholesome action
is easier to see with greed. Take a situation where you missed
several meals and you're feeling very hungry. You walk into a room,
and there's a child with an ice cream cone. There's a great sense
of longing, "I want that, I'm hungry!" You know there's no
danger that you will reach out and grab the treat from a small child.
None of you is going to do that.
It's not hard for you to
say, "I'm feeling hunger. I'm so hungry, I feel I could reach
out and grab that ice cream cone and eat it. I really want that."
You don't hate yourself for that feeling. You just note, "feeling
hunger, feeling greed, wanting the ice cream." And you walk on,
perhaps deciding that you'll stop and get something to eat. Here is
the emotion of wanting transformed into skillful action.
Why is anger so different? You
feel anger arise and you want to lash out at somebody. Most of you
are not going to lash out and hit someone any more than you were
going to take the ice cream cone. That doesn't lessen the intensity
of wanting to retaliate. Then you come to the judgment, "I
shouldn't feel this way, I'm bad to feel this way."
Were you bad to want the ice
cream cone? You were feeling hunger and desire. Now you're feeling
anger. Are you bad to want to reach out and hit somebody? You don't
have to act on that, and you don't have to suppress it or hate
yourself for it. Anger is just anger. Why make it more than that? You
have not been conditioned to judge yourself for desire, but anger is
another story. Can you see that they are both uncomfortable feelings
but your response to them is vastly different? What is this
conditioned mind? How are you a slave to it? Where does freedom lay?
As you notice the intensity of
the angry feeling, you might begin to see what lies behind it. Anger
is a mask. Behind it, you will often find fear. Fear that your needs
won't be met leads to grasping and clinging, to jealousy and
selfishness. Fear that you are going to be hurt arouses a need to
protect the self. In that need to protect, anger arises with its rush
of adrenaline.
Thousands of years ago, your
ancestors may have felt fear, perhaps of an attacking wild animal,
and a sense that they or their children or friends could be hurt.
With that rush of adrenaline came a rising of the hand and a desire
to kill, followed by a throwing of whatever missile was at hand to
kill the wild creature before it killed them. You have had much
practice with that process.
Now you've evolved to a
different level, but the same habits come to bear. When fear is
experienced, the body reverberates with so many echoes of past
danger. There is the constant question: "Could I be hurt?" When
you feel threatened, fear arises and anger often follows. In these
days it's rarely a physical threat, but the process is the same.
As you observe deeper levels
of the process, the solidity of the emotions changes. It's no
longer a solid mass with which you must do battle. Instead, it
becomes just anger. When you notice it early, just noticing the first
tightness in your stomach, then you understand that it is anger
arising in you, and you can be present with it with less reactivity.
Many mind states pass through
you every minute. Some of them are painful, and you may react to that
pain. To free yourselves from reactivity it's useful to see the
arising of such mind states as part of a process.
Central to the teachings of
the Buddha is a natural law called Dependent Origination. Put in
simple terms, for something to arise, the conditions for its arising
must be present. When conditions are no longer present, that which
has arisen dissolves. Understanding the process of how things arise
and dissolve isn't mere intellectualization but is vital to your
lives. Even more, it's a keystone upon which you may begin to act
more skillfully and to free yourselves and others from suffering.
Let's look at the process by
which you move to any emotion, painful or joyful. What really happens
when you feel anger, desire, or even bliss? How do you move into the
experience of emotion?
To experience anything, first
there must be contact of sense to the sense object and consciousness
of the contact. Let's call these steps contact and consciousness.
For example, your eyes touch on the object of sight; you're not
separate from that object but a participant with it in the act of
seeing. In this way we become aware of seeing, hearing, smelling,
tasting, and touching. In the same way the mind touches the mind
object, and thinking is the resulting consciousness.
You may label the
experience–hearing a cough, seeing an angry face, or if mind is the
sense that made contact, perhaps knowing, remembering, or
understanding. We can call this stage perception, perceiving what the
senses have contacted. Notice that there's still no attachment or
aversion. The experience is still neutral. There is just hearing,
seeing, feeling, memory. But mind usually does not stay there.
At this moment of sensation,
feelings may remain neutral or there may be a move from neutral to
pleasant or unpleasant feelings. Then comes the instant we call the
active moment.
This moment is partially conditioned by old habit and partially grows
from wisdom. It is a moment when awareness may overcome conditioning.
It involves the habitual way you may relate to the unpleasant with
the arising of aversion, or relate to the pleasant with the arising
of grasping. You may experience a tightening in the belly that's
the first physical signal of aversion, or a sense of expansion of the
heart that may be the physical sign of joy or bliss, perhaps followed
by grasping.
If feelings remain neutral,
equanimity may be experienced. There may be brief contraction and
that also is noted and not made into a solid self. The experience is
like entering cool water for a swim. With the cool touch, there will
be contraction, but it releases almost instantly. Equanimity is back.
If there is strong feeling of
pleasant or unpleasant and no equanimity about the feeling, you move
to mental formations such as fear, anger, or craving.
This movement from contact to mental formation happens in a flash, so
you may not see the steps. One wise teacher likens it to falling from
a tree. You don't have time to note, "seeing branches" as you
fall; there is just the falling and then, thud! Ouch! It's
important to understand that the feelings and ensuing mental
formations do not just happen independently, but are the result of
all your past conditioning.
What's the significance of
coming to see that? When there's strong emotion and you understand
with some clarity how it arose you have much more choice. You do not
have to react to emotion or suppress it; you can just be
compassionately, nonjudgmentally present with it and watch. "Whatever
has the nature to arise has the nature to cease" and is not me nor
mine.
It seems important to
understand that it's not the emotion that causes the intensity of
your discomfort, but your relationship with the emotion. To have
inner peace doesn't mean you never feel, but that you are at peace
with whatever arises. It is quite possible to simultaneously
experience anger and compassion. Your compassion is not only for
another, it is for yourself as well. Judgment about your anger is
what separates you from the deepening of compassion and from your
true nature, not the contraction we call anger in itself. Can you be
present with anger without hating the anger? When you hate your own
anger, that's just more hatred.
You ask about righteous anger.
Perhaps you've been with a prejudiced being that spoke in a
negative way about those of another race or religion, and it
infuriated you. There was a thought, "I've got to teach this
person. How dare he speak that way?" If he says, "That's bad,"
and you say, "No. It's good," he can't hear you. You crash
into each other. There's no room for communication, which can never
come from a place of hatred.
What might happen if you hear
the person who speaks with prejudice, and, as rage rises in you, you
meet that contraction and touch it with a bit of compassion? Here is
a simple reminder of our joint human fallibility, and of our
interconnectedness. We are all in this together, both as beings
dependent on each other here in this earth plane and, more
profoundly, as part of the great ocean of love that cannot be
separated into individuals, no matter how much we wish it could so
that we could blame the other. Then you know you are both feeling
fear and you see his prejudice in a new light–not "He shouldn't
feel prejudice" but "Why does he feel prejudice? What are his
fears?"
Can you accept that if his
prejudice arouses rage in you, you also have fear, different from his
in specifics, perhaps, but still fear? Can you meet fear with the
openhearted question, "What are my fears? Why does his speech
arouse so much anger in me?"
As compassion leads you to
hear his fear, then communication becomes possible; change becomes
possible. This is the basis of compassion and unconditional love–
learning to watch fear and anger arise in yourself, and asking
without judgment, what is this anger, this fear? Such reflection is a
movement of generosity and kindness. The practice of bodhicitta,
of generous caring for others, nurtures it. When awareness sees the
arising of anger, it is not caught in the anger. You step outside
your personal story and look with wisdom and compassion. Until you
can be compassionate to yourself, you cannot be compassionate toward
another. Such compassion is the only real basis for world peace.
So this is a vital lesson that
all of you are learning, to relate differently to yourselves and to
each other than you have in the past, to begin to notice how anger
arises, to begin to let go a bit of the judgment of yourself for
being angry.
I said earlier that there are
two issues–the difficult emotion itself and your relationship to
it. Part of what you're learning is to change your relationship to
emotions, to feel equanimity with whatever is coming through. Unless
you're going to go off and live in a cave, completely alone, you
can't control your experiences in large part. Your lives interweave
with each other. And, even in the cave, loneliness or other strong
emotions may arise. There may be a longing for companionship, or
aversion to the snake or spider that shares your space, or to the
weather. So, you can't prevent any of that, but you can affect what
happens inside when you're experiencing such emotion.
Something wonderful begins to
happen as you move from feeling anger and self-hatred about the anger
to feeling anger and a calm acceptance. "Here's anger. It will
come, and then it will pass." We call this equanimity toward
emotions.
With that compassion for
yourself, you begin to see another's anger or greed in a different
light. That being is feeling anger. Suddenly, you no longer need to
say, "I'm not going to let myself get angry" or need to judge
another for his anger. There's a shift within you.
The compassionate heart opens
when you see another feeling anger and realize the depth of that
person's pain. You genuinely don't feel angry. You may think about
it later and say "How did I do that? I truly wasn't angry." You
are breaking loose from conditioned mind and creating a new pattern
for yourself, a new way of being with heavy emotions, a new way of
being at peace within yourself. You're learning that your inner
peace doesn't depend on external circumstances, but comes from
within. And that is a wonderful piece of learning.
You are also learning that all
these outer expressions of being–the aggregates of form, feelings,
thoughts, and even the stream of consciousness–are not self. You
need to be responsible for what arises but you need not take it so
personally. As you rest ever more deeply in Being, in Pure Awareness,
you see so many thoughts and sensations come and go, and they have no
more substance than the clouds that pass you by.
. . .
This earth is your schoolroom.
You have moved into this physical body and into this schoolroom to
learn. To learn what? Compassion. Nonjudgment. Unconditional love.
Grand terms, to be sure, but what do they mean? What does it really
mean to have compassion for another? What does it mean to be
nonjudgmental?
Think about the last hour;
just review it in your minds for a moment. Was there any judgment?
"That driver ahead of me is slow. I don't like that house. Why
did somebody paint it that color? This road is too bumpy, doesn't
anybody in this town take care of the roads?" Little opinions. I'm
not talking about hatred, just little bits of judgment.
Some of you may say "But,
Aaron, if we never judge anything as deficient, then there's no
force within us to try to change that which we see as lacking." To
see deficiency is not to judge something as "bad" nor to
invite negative emotion around that deficiency. Barbara is training a
puppy. His understanding is as yet very deficient in many areas. His
attention span is rather short. He has learned to sit and stay
remarkably well for a three-month-old puppy, but ten seconds is about
as long as he can stay. Does Barbara hate the puppy or rage at him
when he gets up from sitting? Or does she simply walk back to him and
say, "Sit. Stay"? She understands that having a short attention
span is the nature of a puppy.
One does not need to feel
hatred or even mild irritation to see what is wrong in the world and
attempt to change it. Discernment does not require that you take what
arises as a personal affront and become emotionally entangled with
it, but just that you attend to it. In fact, one can create change
far more readily and more skillfully when there is no rage. Here is
where anger offers the most energy, when it is transformed to
compassion and to recognition of your nonseparation with this earth
and all life upon it.
So, what is the path to truly
moving beyond anger? In human form, can you ever reach a point where
you don't feel anger? It is what I just described; we've come
full circle. You can only begin to move beyond anger by accepting
anger. You cannot transcend what you don't accept. When you find
compassion for all the heavy emotions in yourself, you have nurtured
equanimity and awakened presence. Then you find that the same
catalyst that led to rage or greed or jealousy simply leads you to an
openhearted look at the situations that confront you, without
judgment. It becomes possible to open with forgiveness to another
rather than to hold onto anger and blame.
It is a wonderful process, and
one in which you are all involved. It's not something you will
choose to be a part of. You've already taken that step by moving
into incarnation. You are in this schoolroom and offered the
curriculum. It's your choice whether you practice the lessons that
are offered. Life 101: How to live your lives more wisely. How to
love more fully. And yes, my dear ones, you'll still be perfecting
those lessons when you've moved on to graduate school.
|
