Acharya Prashant explains that deep within, we authorize ourselves to be angry and destructive. Superficially, to align with social norms and moral pretense, we tell ourselves that anger is unjustified, uncivilized, and needless. However, anger keeps recurring because its source not only remains intact but is also continuously fed and supported by us. He likens this to feeding the root of a tree while trimming the shoot; the tree may appear pruned, but it retains all the energy and vitality from its powerful, continuously fed roots. We justify our anger by feeling short-changed, cheated, or victimized. By continuing to assert that we are incomplete while simultaneously bemoaning this incompleteness, we create the grounds for anger. If you hold grudges and believe the stories of your victimization by situations, the past, or people, it is impossible not to be angry. One cannot feel like a victim, a loser, or cheated and not be angry. We want to maintain the hurt, wounds, and bruised identities because they give us a moral upper hand and make us feel superior. We tell ourselves, "I am the one who has suffered so much," or "I have been deceived so much by the world." By doing this, we nurture the grudges and hurts but also wish to not be angry, which is an impossible contradiction. We feed our own anger and then try to put a lid on it, which will obviously explode. When it does, we develop another grudge against life, feeling it's an injustice that a peaceful person like us gets angry. We blame some fault in the existential algorithm, not ourselves. As long as you maintain the stories that show you as suffering, dependent, lonely, and defeated, you will have to be angry. The choice is whether to drop the anger or the stories. The stories are dear to us; they are our life's stuff. Anger appears ugly and has social and material costs, so we want to avoid its expression. However, we want to keep the inner filth because it is not socially visible. The speaker states that expressed anger is less dangerous than unexpressed, simmering anger. When anger just simmers within, we get a nice alibi to maintain to ourselves that all is well. A lot of spiritual practice has unfortunately become about this: practicing a smile outwardly while inwardly there is vapor and ash, which is even more dangerous.
