Opus Day 20: Transform Your Anger

[Barque]

“If you are looking for your life work and carry deep, hidden anger with you, it will only work against you unless you submit it to an alchemy by which its constructive powers are released. Anger can become determination, personal power, a sharp mind, effective personal presence, clear decisions, and grounded creativity. Anger can be either very destructive or immensely useful.
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There is a form of creativity that reaches for the stars and is sunny and bright, but there is another kind, just as fruitful, that is dark and deep, more hidden than visible, motivated sometimes by anger and envy. This deep source of the creative spirit is difficult to express in our world because we have difficulty appreciating the positive qualities of the dark emotions. But they give a person depth, strength of character, and an earthy honesty and counter any tendency toward the sentimental and the naïve.”

Today’s Work: Get close to your anger by staying with its sensations. Imagine using unexpressed anger as a source of strength. Describe this transformation.

Share your responses with Barque readers, by replying to this discussion.

[Dr. Robert Klass]

Dear Ann, I absolutely love your post! I think that you make certain assumptions that I don't totally agree with, but let's face it, it would be truly unbelievable if all of us agreed on everything.

What I have tried to communicate...and I may not be up to the task...is that my limited experience and knowledge of so-called "higher awareness" does not deny the existance of such things as anger, grief, fear and other negative emotional states; from what I can tell, if we are "more aware," those things don't go away, but we are also much more aware of a lot of options, many of them positive, than we may have not been willing to confront before we got to "high." (Once again, I am not talking about drug use.)

I cannot find any evidence to suggest that the universe requires us to experience equal amounts of anger and all of those other things before we can experience love, joy and all of those positive things. Once we experience anger, etc., we know they exist, and they will always be there. What we know to be true is that we have at least some freedom of choice about how our emotions and how long we choose to hold on to the experience (i.e. we decide to be angry about or at something in our lives). We perceive our lives through a set of "emotional glasses" (for lack of a better metaphor), and if the whole thing is out of our control, where does the anger and all that other stuff come from?

In regard to love, marriage, romance, etc., I totally agree with you that there are societal limitations put upon what are lives are supposed to look like, and hardly anybody's life ends up following the Cleaver family/Ozzie and Harriet model. Within those limitations, we are free to find other options, and apparently you have done that. Without going into details, my wife and I have also been involved in "non-traditional" relationships, and it's quite obvious to me that it's not only possible to love much more than just one other human being, it's quite easy to do that! Thank God it's that way!

As I've gotten older, I've become more interested in that thing called "unconditional love." It's not like I rejected that concept before...I just never paid much attention to it at all. It used to be that I'd hear somebody say something like "Well, I love them unconditionally, but they don't feel that way about me." I'd think "Well, if it's really true that you love them unconditionally, why does it matter how they feel?" I'm 64, and the idea that I can love unconditionally and without limitations is pretty new to me. As I've become more interested in the teachings of Jesus and other spiritual icons, I find that that's what these beings were talking about. OK, enough for now! Aloha, Bob

[Dr. Robert Klass]

P.S. to Ann, I find that lots of people, including myself, have come to certain conclusions about God, life, spirituality, etc., and because I'm interested in these things, I've spent a lot of time examining certain concepts to see how well they stand up to scrutiny. I find that in certain cases, these conclusions may not be valid. Let me give you an example...

In the past couple of years, there have been a bunch of books (i.e. Christopher Hitchens) about how God doesn't exist. I've seen Hitchens and some other people on Larry King and other venues, and I find most of their arguments to be pretty sophmoric. (Not to mention, I didn't think it was possible for atheists to be holier-than-thou, but these guys manage to pull it off.) Their arguments go something like the following:
1-Organized religions, acting in the name of God, have oppressed people, started wars and done all kinds of horrible things.
2-If God existed, this wouldn''t be happening.
3-Therefore, God does not exist.
What's illogical about this argument is that whether or not God exists has nothing to do with what organized religions have or have not done.

In your post, it seems to me that you may have come to an invalid conclusion about love. It seems to me that the argument goes something like this:
1-We are told, by parents, movies, conditioning, etc. that love is supposed to be a certain way.
2-What almost everybody finds in life is that love doesn't work out like that.
3-Therefore, love is a fraud.
Maybe love always was and always will be valid, and the real problem we have is that we have bought into naive concepts and notions about the nature of love.

Ann, thank you for being one of the people who is inspiring me to write! Aloha, Bob

[Dr. Robert Klass]

Dear Julie, There is a "flip side" to unforgiveness and bitterness; it is forgiveness and sweetness. We may hope that the other person gets sick or whatever, but we are the ones carrying around those negative emotions. Once again, I am more interested in what that negativity does to "the carriers" than I am in what it does to the object of our anger.

Somewhere in all of this, I've been playing with thoughts about the nature of consciousness. How about we consider what higher consciousness is about? What makes us "high?" (I'm not talking about using drugs. For the record, back in 1966, in my fraternity, I had my first chance to smoke marijuana. I inhaled! Other than that, I'm not going to talk about whatever drug history I might have.) If somebody has attained a higher state of awareness, do they act differently than the rest of us? Can we tell if they are at a higher place, or do we think they are just acting strange? Where do love, anger and all of those other emotions fit into consciousness?

OK, that's enough for now. I don't claim to have definitive answers to any of these questions, but I have an ongoing interest in all of them. Here's hoping you're having a nice day! Aloha, Bob

[Dr. Robert Klass]

Dear Gail, Thanks for writing! I wasn't suggesting that S. handle his problem any differently than he did; I was just throwing our another possible option, one that I've often had difficulty getting next to. Another possible option would be showing up at the man's office with a loaded shot gun. Please understand, I'm not advocating any course of action, but as a form of mental exercise, I try to consider all options, no matter how crazy they might seem. Considering something conceptually doesn't mean that somebody is going to do it.

I've got to tell you that I have a problem with what you said about "anger is the teacher." OK, I'm willing to admit that we can learn things from being angry, but truth be told, I think that anger is an extremely poor teacher. I've learned a lot better stuff from love than I've ever learned from anger, and it feels so much better.

I believe in another post you said something about what we could do to put more love in the world. The answer that I keep coming back to is that the best place to start doing that is with ourselves. Have a nice Memorial Day weekend! Aloha, Bob

[Dr. Robert Klass]

Dear Julie, When you said that you had never thought about how we might perceive a person who had a higher state of awareness, it struck a chord with me. Awhile back, I'm not even sure when it started, I started to examine my viewpoints about God, Jesus, Buddha, higher consciousness, love, prayer, spirituality, time, space and quite a few other subjects. I realized that, in truth, it wasn't that I had rejected any of these things; it was more like I had never really thought about them at all. If you had asked me if I believed in God, I would have said "yes," but, beyond that, I couldn't tell you anything about God other than the standard cliches.

As I have considered these parts of my life, talked to people and did research, I have found them to be ever-more fascinating. More than that, I have come to some conclusions that work a lot better for me than much of what I had heard but never thought about. For instance, I realized that I had a real problem with the idea that God is, apparently, so unhappy, angry, vengeful, depressed, etc., with all that he created. In Genesis, it says that God created everything and said it was all good. If God is so powerful...and I'm willing to believe he is...God should be able to find a way to be happy. It also meant that not only was God a failure, so was everything he created, including me! After looking at all the best information I could find, I came to the conclusion that God was absolutely right...everything he created...no matter how it might look to me...was good, and if I was more grateful to God for all that he had given to me, my life would be much better too!

I also realized that I knew nothing about Jesus. I came to the conclusion that most of us are fixated on how Jesus died, and we really don't pay much attention to how he lived. I'm wiling to believe that Jesus died for our sins, but more than that, he lived for our greater glory! For me, it cast God, Jesus and many other things in a totally different light. I can't tell if, as I examine these subjects, I'm becoming more aware, or, as I become more aware, I'm more interested in examining things, but it doesn't particularly seem to matter. Maybe it's both!

Bottom line, each one of us has to come up with those answers that work for us as we experience our life's spiritual journey, but it's extremely comforting to know that there are a lot of good, sincere people who are interested in these important parts of our lives. Aloha, Bob
P.S. I noticed that we have lost Gail.

[Barque]

Yes, unfortunatley we've lost Gail and Ken Blackham who has been a member of this forum since its inception early last year. Ken contributed many helpful and informative comments and I'm sorry that he has left. It seems that when a member leaves, his/her discussion posts are automatically removed. I invite current Barque forum members to respond to more recent posts in the Opus offerings and to give this particular thread a rest.