If I go to a restaurant seeking a tasty meal and get a horrid one, I'll be angry, because I did not get what I wanted.
If I return the next night, and I'm angry, it's not because I did not get what I wanted: I chose to go there, so I got precisely what I wanted.
I must have wanted something else, and I calculated that the price, the horrid meal, was worth paying.
The real question is: 'What is the "something else"?'
Often, anger is the something else. It's the very reason I'm there.
Why anger is attractive:
- Guilt calls down punishment
- If I'm guilty, I'm calling down punishment
- If you're guilty, I must be innocent
- I can then operate the punishment cannon
- The only person the cannon can't point at is me
- So attack makes me safe
... at least, that's the ego's 'reasoning'.
The truth, however, is that cannons don't actually fire cannonballs. They only ever blow up the operator. In short, the punishment cannon literally misfires, every single time.
What is the path back?
- Recognise that the anger is really displacement of guilt
- Guilt can hang itself on the hook of wrongdoing
- But material wrongdoing is not its source
- Material wrongdoing stems from the guilt
- ... then seems to produce and justify it
- Guilt's real source is specialness:
- The denial of the unity of everything
- And the establishment of myself as a separate individual
- ... in opposition to the will of God ...
- Which is unity
- This opposition is the 'sin'
- Although the separation is an illusion
- So nothing has happened
- So no sin has been committed
- So there is nothing to be guilty about
- So there is nothing to be frightened of
- And I can sink bank into unity and merely ask of God:
- Where would you have me go?
- What would you have me do?
- What would you have me say, and to whom?