Your Anger contains a Secret || AP Neem Candies
Acharya Prashant: If anger besets you, look at your entire life, the full spectrum. Nothing short of that would do. Anger is not a disease in itself; anger is an indicator. And, anger is a very powerful and gross indicator.
Anger becomes necessary so that you may see how bad your condition is. Subtle signs of discomfort and bad living are always there, but one misses those signs. Because you miss those signs or ignore them, hence your system has to forcibly show you that there is something wrong with you, hence you erupt.
When you erupt then you cannot miss what is happening with you. It is so violent, so loud, so apparent. You might get slapped. How will you miss the marks on your face? Something this gross has to be done because you are not ready to read the fine print, the subtle message. Are you getting it?
Anger is a message. Anger is not a message that the twenty-fourth hour is misplaced, or infected. Anger is a message that the entire spectrum of twenty-four hours is going wrong. You are not living rightly. You are just not living rightly.
If there is sugar in your urine, do you start treating the urine? You are not eating rightly. The malaise lies elsewhere. Don’t take a canister of urine to the ICU. The urine is merely an indicator. You are living wrongly.
What is it to live wrongly? There cannot be anger without the frustration of desire. You cannot be angry if your desire has not been defeated. Anger is an upsurge of energy. Do you see what happens when you are angry? What happens? There is a rush of adrenaline. Your limbs start shaking with energy. Your eyes lit up. Your cheeks get flushed with blood. You are all ready with more energy to do something. Do what? Have you never noticed?
It’s like this you have a desire to reach there (indicating with hands) and there is an obstacle in the way. Now you are angry, now there is so much of energy, and it is needed to overcome the obstacle. That is why anger provides you with so much energy, so that you may defeat the obstacle and fulfill your desire. Where there is the frustration of desire there is anger. Do you get it? Whenever you would place your desire outside of you, you would find that there is an obstacle.
Do you know what is that obstacle? That obstacle is yourself. All anger in some way, therefore, is against yourself, and hence is self-destructive. Are you getting it?
Place a desire outside of yourself, feel incomplete, and tell yourself that that thing there will plug the hole, and you have invited frustration. You expected something from somebody. That is something somebody cannot provide. Why do you think you are angry only at that somebody? No, you are equally angry at yourself for keeping that expectation. And that is why you burn when you are in anger. Because you are punishing yourself, you are telling yourself why the hell did I expect this from this fellow?
Often it happens that the fellow never even asked for your expectations. You in your own wonderland assumed that you are entitled to expect. And when the expectation wasn’t met you are up in flames. Whom, are you punishing? Yourself. And that is why anger leads to so many mental and physical disorders. It is fulfilling its purpose. You are punishing yourself. The surge in your energy is eating you up. Are you getting it?
Do you see how incompleteness leads to anger? Because I am incomplete, so I’m looking at that one as the one who could complete me, as the one who would plug the hole. Now that one cannot plug the hole, because the hole is fiction. I’m assuming that here, right now here, there is a hole in the earth. And I bring that bottle to fill that hole up. Will I succeed?
Questioner: No.
Acharya Prashant: Why? Because there is no hole. And what do I do then? I want to destroy the bottle and how do I destroy the bottle? By banging it against my own forehead. Now, what is anger doing? First of all, it is arising because of a misplaced assumption.
You are trying to fill a hole that never existed. Then apparently you are trying to punish the other one for his apparent failure. He has not failed at all. You are demanding the impossible from him. You’re demanding that the bottle must fill up a non-existent hole. What has the poor bottle done? The bottle could have never succeeded, but you still want to punish it. And how do you punish the bottle? By banging against your own forehead.
So, I do not know whether the bottle gets punished but surely you get punished. That’s what anger is all about. In some sense, anger does justice. Because you made the wrong assumption so you get punished. Some other fellow, by the way, also gets sucked in, and he keeps wondering “What wrong have I done? You had your whole expectations in your own dreamland. I never asked you to raise those expectations. You never asked from me whether you should hold those expectations from me. Now that those expectations are not being fulfilled, you are blaming me. What are you doing? You are banging me against your own head.” That is anger.
