Anger has Many Faces
There are many forms of anger and aggression, and the way it manifests varies in unique combinations from person to person. In addition to those already mentioned, irritation, frustration, passive aggressive behavior, self hatred, anger management issues of all kinds, depression, and anxiety all have their roots fully or partially in anger based patterns.
In speaking of the energy of clarity when it has become blocked in an extreme way, Rockwell says,
When this energy is most intensified, vajra people live in a realm of sheer hell, a place of continuous oppression, irritation, and anger…There is a fascination with being an oppressor, defeating others and lording it over them. The mirror-like wisdom becomes a black hole of aggression with seemingly no way out.
Transmutation
Now that we’ve seen how vajra family energy manifests as both wisdom and anger, it seems logical that we should move away from the anger and towards the wisdom. It seems straightforward that we need to embody the positive qualities of the clarity energy and eliminate the negative.
However it’s not that simple. There is a bit of a paradox in that, yes we want to let go of our anger and embody the wisdom qualities, yet at the same time we won’t succeed in doing that unless we make friends with our anger and all the negative qualities it presents.
Kindness and Honesty are the Path Forward
Making friends with our experience, all of our experience, is the quick path to our heart’s desire. It’s an impossible battle to try and fight against our state of mind. As long as we reject part of our experience as bad, we’ll constantly struggle against that part, and in the end we will only create further aggression and anger within our being.
So if you find yourself viewing this material with a good verses bad dichotomy, step back and reset your attitude. The attitude taught by the Buddha is a combination of kindness and precision.
Kindness is that we have a friendly approach to ourselves and our experience.Precision is that we use our intelligence to view what is. In terms of our goal of uncovering and embodying the wisdom of anger, ultimately it is this friendly, intelligent, and open approach that will allow us to progress forward on our journey.
Making friends with our experience, all of our experience, is the quick path to our heart’s desire.
If we can be honest with ourselves and see our anger clearly for what it is, and if we can make friends with it, the wisdom will gradually present itself. Of course it’s likely that much of the time we won’t maintain such a noble attitude towards our experience.
Especially in the beginning it’s likely we’ll hate our anger and want to eradicate it like some irritating pest. It’s normal to feel this way, and yet it presents another opportunity to remember to be kind with ourselves and allow space as we find our way.
Anger and Clarity Wisdom are the Same Stuff
Furthermore, the most interesting and useful aspect of confused water element energy is that strangely enough, the wisdom aspect is present within it. Anger and mirror like wisdom are of the identical exact same substance; they are both water element energy, the energy of clarity.
The wisdom manifests when we simply allow the energy to be, as it is. Anger management issues develop when we manipulate that energy in a way that causes harm, either to ourselves or others.
If anger and wisdom were separate things then transmutation wouldn’t be possible. You can’t change one thing into another. Transmutation is simply seeing through the confusion to reveal the true thing underneath. In our case we want to see through the confusion of anger to reveal the clarity, the mirror like wisdom just beneath the surface.
How do we approach transmutation then? The first step is to become familiar with the substance we are working with. We want to become familiar with this water element energy, with the negative side – fixated anger, and with the wisdom qualities.
As we become more intimate with this energy of clarity and the different ways it manifests in our mind, we’ll have more freedom to navigate within that spectrum. By working with various anger management techniques, mindfulness meditation, and other self awareness practices, we become more and more familiar with the energy of anger as it manifests in our life.
The second step of transmutation is to understand how we distort the pure energy of clarity into anger. What is the process at play there? If the nature of the water element is clarity, why do we distort it into something that causes us so much pain?
What is the dynamic that causes us to distort something that is basically good and positive? We want to understand this and we also want to discover it in an experiential way. As we become more and more familiar with how we shut this energy down we we’ll have more leverage to step out of our destructive habits.
The Sudden and Gradual Paths
With this understanding and experience as our basis, the third step of transformation is to do it. Here we have two approaches, the sudden path and the gradual path. The sudden path is possible because stepping out of anger into mirror like wisdom is not such a difficult thing, since anger is only a mental habit. Stuck anger is a mental habit of shutting down, and at any time we have the option to open up to our experience and just let go of anger. Even in the midst of an out of control rage it’s possible to cut it at the root.
We can do it on the spot by suddenly and completely abandoning the fixation of anger and stepping into the spaciousness of clarity. This is an advanced practice and comes with confidence and experience, but on the other hand you could just do it on the spot at any time.
As we become more and more familiar with how we shut this energy down we we’ll have more leverage to step out of our destructive habits.
The gradual path reflects the fact that our habitual anger patterns are deeply engrained and most of the time we don’t have the presence of mind to see through them. A vast majority of the time we just don’t have the ability to let it go on the spot. This is where meditation comes in.
Meditation trains you to be present in the moment, giving you strength to choose what you do with your mind. Meditation trains your ability to step back from the mental and emotional momentum that usually controls us. Over time this can help you to see through your problems with anger management, and to allow water element clarity to shine forth.
How to Relate With This Material
It’s possible that all this talk about elements, energy of clarity, and transformation may seem foreign and abstract. You may even be regretting that you purchased this book. However don’t give up. It’s understandable if it isn’t making sense yet. After all, this framework for talking about anger is a dramatic departure from how most of us have always thought of it, so these ideas may not resonate at first.
My own experience with this esoteric material is that even after many years of hearing it, sometimes it makes sense and sometimes not. This is normal because these teachings speak at profound levels, and our access to these levels will come and go.
What follows is an exercise that can help you make more sense of the clarity of anger in an experiential way:
Naked Anger Management Exercise: The Raw Energy of Anger
This exercise requires that you experience anger sometime when you are alone. Read the instructions, and when the time is right give it a try. Here is the exercise:
The next time you experience anger when you are alone, just stay put. Don’t move a millimeter. In your body and your mind don’t leave for another place. Just stop everything and be right there in the open space of anger. The impulse to contract into a hard ball or erupt in a fiery rage will be powerful, because we simply aren’t accustomed to staying present with strong emotional energy. So feel the intensity of the anger, feel the almost uncontrollable impulse to freeze, to shut down, and then just let the whole thing go, just let go into open space. That’s it.
Anger feels like a blazing fire but it truly cannot hurt you. It’s actually not a big deal even though it feels like a VERY bid deal. So let anger do its thing, and relax into it. An analogy is to imagine your hand squeezing a hot coal in a tight fist. Anger is that hot coal. Normally with anger we squeeze and squeeze and it hurts like hell, yet we can’t stop squeezing. The exercise is to simply open your fist and let it drop to the ground.
Be kind with yourself and see what happens. Good luck!
Summary
At this stage we have some basic understanding of how we perpetuate suffering because we think we are solid and unchanging and independent, and that we are basically bad. We’ve looked at the world from the viewpoint of Tibetan Buddhism, and glimpsed that the basis of everything is open, fluid, and free of problem, and that this is known as basic goodness.
We’ve been introduced to five elements of reality known as the five families, and in particular we’ve explored water family energy, which is the energy of clarity that underlying anger. We’ve seen that anger comes from solidifying the open quality of this clarity into frozen ego serving patterns.
So now what? What are we going to do with all this information, and what are we going to do about the difficulties with anger management that burden our life? The answers are found throughout this website. Keep on reading, do some consistent process work, and forge an anger management path for yourself to a more uplifted and clarity filled life.
