Q. Gary...very happy to be in communication with you. The subjects you touch on are very near and dear to a spiritual practitioner's heart...had some breakthroughs...now I am
more relaxed and happy so there is a different practice...am dealing less with fear and more with anger that arises in daily
interactions that don't go my way! And i find it difficult to do self inquiry
on anger/irritation...
G. Hi. Sounds like your practice is going well.
What to "do" about anger is a great question that i have been fascinated by. When "the page turned" for "me", self-referential thought basically stopped, as did self-referentially-constructed desires and fears and stories about anger. However, i still had bursts of anger. This anger was fast, "primal", possibly protective, but was so fast that i couldn't get "in front of it".
This anger was disturbing, as i had been told by my parents, family, my strict Methodist church, other religions, etc., that anger MUST be avoided. Nonetheless it was there.
In looking at anger, three types of anger are often classified by psychologists:
a) "hasty and sudden anger" - named by Joseph Butler, an 18th century English theologian and philosopher, who had a significant impact on philosophers such as David Hume and Adam Smith. This anger is "immediate" and is connected with self-preservation and occurs in many animals when they are tormented or trapped. This is episodic.
b) "settled and deliberated anger" is "related to one's psychological interpretation of having been offended, overpowered, wronged, or denied and a tendency to react through retaliation." This type of anger can go on for a long, long time and can end badly. This is episodically-triggered, but gets much more interesting with time.
c) "dispositional" anger is related to "inherent" character traits rather than to instincts or cognition responding to an episode as in a) and b). Irritability and sullenness are characteristics. This is often physiological, genetic and/or neurological.
we are concerned here with a) and b). Interestingly, most modern psychologists view anger as "a primary, natural, and mature emotion experienced by virtually all humans at times, and as something that has functional value for survival."
Well if it is "experienced by virtually all humans at times", what about our major spiritual leaders, do they experience anger?
Whatever your feelings re religion, the Dalai Lama is someone for whom many meditators feel deep gratitude; he was a/the critical driver in the development of neuroscientific research on meditation. Many of us "flew blind" for decades w/o any scientific validation for, or acceptance of, meditation. i am deeply grateful to the Dalai Lama for his efforts.
The Dalai Lama has also reached out to other teachings, i.e., he wrote on the cover of "The Essential Teachings of Ramana Maharshi" ... "Ramana Maharshi's spiritual wisdom is guiding millions of people."
However, even the Dalai Lama has moments of anger:
And the Dalai Lama is not alone; the famous Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh gets angry. As he says:
“In the beginning you may not understand the nature of your anger, or why it has come to be. But if you know how to embrace it with the energy of mindfulness, it will begin to become clear to you.”
"Our attitude is to take care of anger. We don’t suppress or hate it, or run away from it. We just breathe gently and cradle our anger in our arms with the utmost tenderness."
Thich Nhat Hanh has even written a book on the subject, "Anger; Wisdom for Cooling the Flames".
My Zen roshis/masters and yoga teachers/"gurus" also got angry, some of them often. One wonders how much of the anger of these masters arose from their celibacy or attempts at celibacy as there is so much written about how anger arises when one "gives up sex", or tries to.
Ramana Maharshi also got angry and gave advice on how to deal with it.
So it is safe to assume that "everyone" gets angry.
How does anger arise cognitive neuroscientifically?
Anger is the response to a perceived threat, real or imagined. This could be a) a physical threat to our body, b) a psychological threat to our reputation, integrity or standing in the heirarchy, or c) a physical or psychological threat to another folk that "matters" to us.
There are two main sites in the brain for anger; a) the amygdala, which operates at an instinctual level, and is very old on an evolutionary scale, and b) the neurocortex, which is more recent evolutionarily and is responsible for the intellectual abilities, among other things, of higher primates and some other species. These play different roles in anger and are to some extent interrelated.
When we encounter a threat, the alert goes directly to the amygdala. Because this is a critical element of the survival system, information to and from the amygdala moves very fast, approaching instantaneous.
Studies show that information about auditory or visual threat-related stimuli can reach the amygdala by a fast subcortical (below the cortex) thalamoamygdala route as well as by a slower thalamocortical–amygdala pathway (Le Doux, J. 2003, "The Emotional Brain, Fear and the Amygdala", in Cellular and Molecular Biology.).
Luo, et al. in "Emotional Automaticity is a Matter of Timing" in The Journal of Neuroscience in 2010, confirmed these two different amygdala responses - a fast response in 30 to 140 milliseconds, and a later response at 280 to 410 milliseconds which goes the frontroparietal cortex for more elaborate processing. The fast response is described as "rapid preattentive detection of threat-related stimuli", i.e. response occurs before we can even "pay attention" to it, in work by Le Doux, Armony, Anderson, and others.
The amygdala sends the signal to our hypothalamus, the brain's hormone control center, which instantly pumps out adrenaline and cortisol to prepare to fight or flee (or freeze on the spot).
So what to do about these two angers; "hasty and sudden" and "settled and deliberated", w/our meditation?
IME, i ultimately accepted "hasty and sudden" anger and focused on what i could do something about, i.e. "settled and deliberated" anger, the processed kind, which rarely occurs as it is "self-referential". The "hasty and sudden" anger arises when i am very tired, or my blood sugar is very low - the same situations in which thoughts start for "me". If they arise, the old standbys come in, "Where am I?", "Whose anger is this?", etc.
The Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh, consistent with their practices, counsel folk to be present, mindful and aware, and focus on the after affects, and accept, even welcome, the initial spike of anger as a teaching. In fact, one criticism on Amazon of Thich Nhat Hanh's book "Anger" is that it "is a rehash of Thich Nhat Hanh's message concerning mindful living." Isn't that really the message?
It is interesting that in contemporary psychology, there also is little/no focus on suppression, with all of the focus being on "anger management".
What to "do" about anger is a great question that i have been fascinated by. When "the page turned" for "me", self-referential thought basically stopped, as did self-referentially-constructed desires and fears and stories about anger. However, i still had bursts of anger. This anger was fast, "primal", possibly protective, but was so fast that i couldn't get "in front of it".
This anger was disturbing, as i had been told by my parents, family, my strict Methodist church, other religions, etc., that anger MUST be avoided. Nonetheless it was there.
In looking at anger, three types of anger are often classified by psychologists:
a) "hasty and sudden anger" - named by Joseph Butler, an 18th century English theologian and philosopher, who had a significant impact on philosophers such as David Hume and Adam Smith. This anger is "immediate" and is connected with self-preservation and occurs in many animals when they are tormented or trapped. This is episodic.
b) "settled and deliberated anger" is "related to one's psychological interpretation of having been offended, overpowered, wronged, or denied and a tendency to react through retaliation." This type of anger can go on for a long, long time and can end badly. This is episodically-triggered, but gets much more interesting with time.
c) "dispositional" anger is related to "inherent" character traits rather than to instincts or cognition responding to an episode as in a) and b). Irritability and sullenness are characteristics. This is often physiological, genetic and/or neurological.
we are concerned here with a) and b). Interestingly, most modern psychologists view anger as "a primary, natural, and mature emotion experienced by virtually all humans at times, and as something that has functional value for survival."
Well if it is "experienced by virtually all humans at times", what about our major spiritual leaders, do they experience anger?
 |
| The Dalai Lama |
The Dalai Lama has also reached out to other teachings, i.e., he wrote on the cover of "The Essential Teachings of Ramana Maharshi" ... "Ramana Maharshi's spiritual wisdom is guiding millions of people."
However, even the Dalai Lama has moments of anger:
There is a recent youTube interview by TIME magazine with the Dalai Lama on whether he ever feels "angry or even outraged", to which he replies "Oh, yes, of course. I am a human being. If a human being never shows anger, then I think there is something wrong with his or her mind."I am sometimes sad when I hear the personal stories of Tibetan refugees who have been tortured or beaten. Some irritation, some anger comes. But it never lasts long. I always try to think at a deeper level, to find ways to console.
 |
| Thich Nhat Hanh |
“In the beginning you may not understand the nature of your anger, or why it has come to be. But if you know how to embrace it with the energy of mindfulness, it will begin to become clear to you.”
"Our attitude is to take care of anger. We don’t suppress or hate it, or run away from it. We just breathe gently and cradle our anger in our arms with the utmost tenderness."
Thich Nhat Hanh has even written a book on the subject, "Anger; Wisdom for Cooling the Flames".
My Zen roshis/masters and yoga teachers/"gurus" also got angry, some of them often. One wonders how much of the anger of these masters arose from their celibacy or attempts at celibacy as there is so much written about how anger arises when one "gives up sex", or tries to.
Ramana Maharshi also got angry and gave advice on how to deal with it.
So it is safe to assume that "everyone" gets angry.
How does anger arise cognitive neuroscientifically?
Anger is the response to a perceived threat, real or imagined. This could be a) a physical threat to our body, b) a psychological threat to our reputation, integrity or standing in the heirarchy, or c) a physical or psychological threat to another folk that "matters" to us.
There are two main sites in the brain for anger; a) the amygdala, which operates at an instinctual level, and is very old on an evolutionary scale, and b) the neurocortex, which is more recent evolutionarily and is responsible for the intellectual abilities, among other things, of higher primates and some other species. These play different roles in anger and are to some extent interrelated.
 |
| Amygdala Only left side is highlighted |
Studies show that information about auditory or visual threat-related stimuli can reach the amygdala by a fast subcortical (below the cortex) thalamoamygdala route as well as by a slower thalamocortical–amygdala pathway (Le Doux, J. 2003, "The Emotional Brain, Fear and the Amygdala", in Cellular and Molecular Biology.).
Luo, et al. in "Emotional Automaticity is a Matter of Timing" in The Journal of Neuroscience in 2010, confirmed these two different amygdala responses - a fast response in 30 to 140 milliseconds, and a later response at 280 to 410 milliseconds which goes the frontroparietal cortex for more elaborate processing. The fast response is described as "rapid preattentive detection of threat-related stimuli", i.e. response occurs before we can even "pay attention" to it, in work by Le Doux, Armony, Anderson, and others.
The amygdala sends the signal to our hypothalamus, the brain's hormone control center, which instantly pumps out adrenaline and cortisol to prepare to fight or flee (or freeze on the spot).
So what to do about these two angers; "hasty and sudden" and "settled and deliberated", w/our meditation?
IME, i ultimately accepted "hasty and sudden" anger and focused on what i could do something about, i.e. "settled and deliberated" anger, the processed kind, which rarely occurs as it is "self-referential". The "hasty and sudden" anger arises when i am very tired, or my blood sugar is very low - the same situations in which thoughts start for "me". If they arise, the old standbys come in, "Where am I?", "Whose anger is this?", etc.
The Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh, consistent with their practices, counsel folk to be present, mindful and aware, and focus on the after affects, and accept, even welcome, the initial spike of anger as a teaching. In fact, one criticism on Amazon of Thich Nhat Hanh's book "Anger" is that it "is a rehash of Thich Nhat Hanh's message concerning mindful living." Isn't that really the message?
It is interesting that in contemporary psychology, there also is little/no focus on suppression, with all of the focus being on "anger management".
This was great, very useful - thanks.
ReplyDelete(FYI this link "Ramana Maharshi also got angry and gave advice on how to deal with it" goes to a page that sadly no longer exists.)
Hi Amir,
DeleteThanks for the information on the broken link. It has been replaced with a current source on Ramana's advice on dealing with anger.
stillness