My teenager son was once enrolled into an Art of Living camp many years ago. After 3 days of kriyas and Sattvic (read insipid) food, he emerged saying, "I could kill for a piece of pickle!" Very expressive and unambiguous language of having been denied something!
Knowing how much fondness for chillies etc. is in his blood, I could well understand my son's understated rage at having been subjected to the Sattvic regimen. Just escalate similar emotions, and you have situations like in "No one killed Jessica", wherein the guy would well use his gun to get his way, especially when denied another drink at the bar that he demands as his due. In other words, our intense likes and dislikes drive our behaviour, especially in this case, anger.
Is anger all about attitude or provocation or predisposition? In local parlance, we say "anger is on the tip of that person's nose". We also say that some people are not easily provoked, and wonder how they can keep their cool in the face of "so much".
I think anger becomes a style statement for some. I know people who not only use abusive angry language easily, but claim that "that's who we are". I also know that beyond a point, some people start getting ignored and others then say, "don't take him seriously, he's is wild/goes off the handle easily".
That brings me to provocation. It is interesting that provocation is entirely a function of our own attitudes and predispositions. And beyond a point, it is not our rational choice but almost a personal trait or reflex action to get angry in some situations. It is so internalised. At that point we are helpless.
Arjuna asks Krishna in the Bhagavagita how sometimes, even when we don't want to do something (bad) we feel almost driven to do it, in spite of ourselves. Krishna replies that it is because of our Kama and Krodha! Kama = "intense desires or likes"!!! And then the flipside, of our anger on being denied.
Krishna calls these two traits, attraction and anger, as rooted in Rajas or our "wanting" to get something, no matter what. And he calls them the greatest enemies in our journey to liberation, and that they are like the whirlwind, and hard to overcome. So we have to be mindful always of the twin traps of attraction and anger.
They say that when Prahlada's demonic father Hiranyakashipu drove him to the extreme, Vishnu emerged as the raging Narasimha=man-lion, and tore the demon apart. The man-lion was so full of rage that it took a lot to calm him down. So even God shows us that rage beyond a point is hard to control, and so let's watch out! Of course, Vishnu 'used' rage here, and not the other way around.
(photo: this lovely Narasimha idol is in Wheeling, WV Iskcon temple that I visited in 2009).
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