In this article we will continue our psychological discussion of the emotional component to consciousness and some of the more extreme ends of negative emotions such as evil, anger and violence in order to more fully understand their sources and causes in hopes to learn how to transform these qualities within ourselves and within the world at large.
“It is the nonviolent person who cannot be frightened; the violent person can always be threatened with greater violence. If you want to see real bravery, look at the person who is patient under attack, who will not retaliate, who will suffer rather than inflict suffering on others.” 1
Natural Aggression
“What is usually forgotten is the real nature of aggressiveness, which in its truest sense simply means forceful action.
This does not necessarily imply physical force, but instead the power of energy directed into a material action.
Birth is perhaps the most forceful aggression of which you are capable in your system of reality.
In the same way, the growth of any idea into temporal realization is the result of creative aggression.
It is impossible to try to erase true aggressiveness. To do so would obliterate life as you know it.
Normal aggressiveness flows with strong patterns of energy, giving motive power to all of your thoughts whether you consciously regard them as positive or negative, good or bad.
The same thrusting creative surge brings them all forth.
Society, not understanding the nature of normal aggression, considers it violent.
Natural aggression is simply the power to act.
Birth is an aggressive action – the thrust outward with great impetus of a self from within a body into a new environment.
Any creative idea is aggressive.”2
Aggression & Creativity
“The connections between creativity and aggression have never been understood in your society.
A misunderstanding of true aggression can lead into a fear of all emotion, and cause you to cut yourself off from one of nature’s best therapies.
Natural aggression provides the charge for all creativity.
Now reading this, many readers will be taken back, for they believe that love is the impetus, and that love is opposed to aggression.
There is no such artificial division.
Natural aggression is the creative loving thrust forward, the way in which love is activated, the fuel through whose agency love propels itself.
Aggression in the most basic terms has nothing to do with physical violence as you think of it, but with the force through which love is perpetuated and creatively renewed.
Sometimes you think of suicide as ignominious and passive, but of war as aggressive and powerful.
Both are equally the result of passivity and distorted aggression, and of natural pathways of communication not used or understood.
You think of flowers in terms of gentleness, beauty and “goodness” and yet every time a new bud opens there is a great thrust of joyful aggression that is hardly passive, and a daring and courage that reaches actively outward.
Without aggression your body would be denied its growth, the cells within it caught in inertia.
Aggressiveness is at the base of the magnificent bursting of creativity.”3
Good & Evil; Hate & Love
“’The Gita,’ says Mahatma Gandhi, ‘is not a historical discourse…It is the description not of war between cousins, but between two natures in us – the Good and the Evil’…it describes the eternal truth of life that the fiercest battle we must wage is against all that is selfish, self-willed, and separate in us.”4
“Love is propelled by all of the elements of natural aggression, and it is powerful; yet because you have made such divisions between good and evil, love appears to be weak and violence strong.
The “devil” becomes a powerful evil figure.
Hate is seen as far more efficient than love.
The male in your society is taught to personify aggressiveness with all of those antisocial attitudes that he cannot normally demonstrate.
The criminal mind expresses these for him, hence the ambiguous attitudes on the part of society, in which renegades are often romanticized.”5
Are You Afraid Evil is More Powerful than Good?
“You are terrified of the idea that evil is more powerful than good, that one stray violent thought of yours is more important and powerful than the vitality of good.
You have an idea that good is gentle and bad is violent.
This is because in your mind violence and destruction are the same thing.
By this analogy the soft voice is the holy voice and the loud voice is the wicked one, and a strong desire is the bad desire and a weak desire the good one.
You become afraid of projecting ideas or desires outward, for in the back of your mind you think that what is powerful is evil.
The universe is a good universe. It knows its own vitality, and that vitality is within you. You can encourage it freely.
Your own nature is a good nature and you can trust it.
Because something is difficult does not mean it is good.”6
Suppressing Natural Aggression Creates Explosive Pseudo-Aggression
“The worst thing would be to restrain the acknowledgment of pent up, perfectly natural aggression that is ready to explode, all because you are afraid that one stray aggressive thought of yours is more powerful than the vitality that resides in each of you.
The most important thing is to acknowledge the feeling as legitimate, with its own realm of existence, to admit it as a part of yourself.
Then choose how you want to deal with it.
You do not make others the brunt of your anger; anger is merely a method of communication.
Any attempt to impair the flow of true aggression results in a distortive, uneven, explosive pseudo-aggression that causes wars, individual neurosis, and a great many of your problems in all areas.
When you consider a thought good you usually do not question it. You allow it its life and follow it through.
Usually if you regard a thought as bad or beneath you, or if you are ashamed of it, then you try to deny it, stop its motion and hold it back.
You cannot restrain energy, although you may think you can. You simply collect it, whereupon it grows, seeking its fulfillment.
This will lead you to say, “Supposing I feel like killing my boss, or putting poison in my husband’s tea; or worse, hanging my five children on the clothesline instead of the towels? Are you saying that I should merely follow through?”
The fact is that before being “assailed” by what may seem to be such terrifying unnatural ideas, you have already blocked off an endless variety of far less drastic ones, any of which you could have expressed quite safely and naturally in daily life.
Your problem then is not how to deal with normal aggressiveness, but how to handle it when it has remained unexpressed, ignored, and denied over a long period of time.
There is a difference between healthy natural aggressiveness, and the explosive distorted emergence of repressed aggression.”7
Anger, Lust, Pride, Jealousy, Delusion, Greed
These are the Six “Enemies” from Swami Chidvilasananda. Each of these enemies is driven by narrow self-centeredness.
We feel anger when things do not meet our expectations;
Lust when we seek self-gratification of some sort at the expense of somebody or something else;
Arrogant pride when we artificially pump up our sense of worthiness rather than standing confidently yet humbly in the inherent warmth of the Heart;
Jealousy when we forget both another person’s splendor and our own value;
Delusion when we define the world according to our own limited way of seeing things;
And greed when we do not express gratitude for all that God has given us.”
We can, through meditation, contemplation, and the analysis of the mind, thoughts, emotions and beliefs, “learn to fight the battle against self-will and separateness [gaining] the will and the wisdom to transform anger into compassion, fear into courage, and greed into tireless striving for the welfare of others.”8
Anger
The American Psychological Association states, “Anger is an emotion characterized by antagonism toward someone or something you feel has deliberately done you wrong.
Anger can be a good thing. It can give you a way to express negative feelings, for example, or motivate you to find solutions to problems.
But excessive anger can cause problems. Increased blood pressure and other physical changes associated with anger make it difficult to think straight and harm your physical and mental health.”9
“Many people are convinced that anger is always negative.
It can be the most arousing and therapeutic emotion under certain circumstances.
You can then realize that you have cowered before contradictory beliefs for years, rise up in anger against them, and quite literally begin a new life of freedom.
Normal aggressiveness is basically a natural kind of communication, particularly in social orders; a way of letting another person know that in your terms they have transgressed and therefore a method of preventing violence – not of causing it.”10
Dealing with Anger
“If you feel filled with rage, then do not say, “I am filled with peace,” and expect results. You will only be blanketing your feelings and inhibiting your energy and power.
If you are furious, then beat a pillow and experience the rage, but without violence to another.
Work it through until you are physically exhausted.
If you do this honestly the reasons for the fury will come to you, and they will often be quite obvious.
You simply did not want to face them.
In almost all cases of this kind, your feelings will represent a sense of powerlessness on your part, where you delegated strength to a situation or an individual and felt your effort futile in contrast.
Then use the present point of power and feel the energy of your own being surge through your experience.
The knowledge of your own power releases you from all fears, and hence of all rage.”11
“When we fight others, whether physically or in the mind, we harm them and ourselves, but when we fight all that is base and self-willed in us, we bring lasting joy to everyone.”12
Anger
Positive Path
The positive path is one of acceptance and forgiveness, unity, compassion and understanding. It is a dedication of yourself to serve the greatest good of all, which also includes your own greatest good – that which fills your life with abundance and prosperity without taking away from another’s abundance and prosperity. It is a raising up of all peoples to the highest heights of peace, justice and prosperity.
Those on the Positive path and the negative path will use anger differently.
For the positive path, when anger is felt: “An entity polarizing positively perceives the anger.
This entity, if using this catalyst mentally, blesses and loves this anger in itself.
It then intensifies this anger consciously in mind alone until the folly of this red-ray energy is perceived not as folly in itself but as energy subject to spiritual entropy due to the randomness of energy being used.
Positive orientation then provides the will and faith to continue this mentally intense experience of letting the anger be understood, accepted, and integrated.
The other which is the object of anger is thus transformed into an object of acceptance, understanding, and accommodation, all being reintegrated using the great energy which anger began.”13
Negative Path
The negative path is one of control and manipulation, ignorance and separation. It is a dedication of yourself to serve only your own selfish good at the expense of all others. It is the path of injustice, violence, corruption, deception, slavery and elitism.
“The negatively oriented entity will use this anger in a similarly conscious fashion, refusing to accept the undirected or random energy of anger and instead, through will and faith, funneling this energy into a practical means of venting the negative aspect of this emotion so as to obtain control over another, or otherwise control the situation causing anger.
Control is the key to negatively polarized use of catalyst.
Acceptance is the key to positively polarized use of catalyst.
Between these polarities lies the potential for this random and undirected energy creating a bodily complex analog of what you call the cancerous growth of tissue.
The first acceptance, or control depending upon polarity, is of the self.
Anger is one of many things to be accepted and loved as a part of self or controlled as a part of self, if the entity is to do work.”14
It is to be noted that the negative path brings no lasting satisfaction for human beings. “Unfortunately happiness escapes us the more we clutch at it by manipulating those around us and accumulating more material possessions. Security is not found in a stockpile of weapons but in mutual trust and respect among individuals, races, and nations; peace is not found in asserting our rights over others but in assuring the lasting welfare of our extended circle of family and friends”15
Projecting “Evil” Outwards – The Problem of Equating Aggression with Violence
“The need to act and be in control of action is paramount in conscious beings.
As long as power is equated with violence, then you will feel it necessary to regulate normal aggression in your behavior; and considering power as violent, you will be afraid to act to some extent.
You will then consider goodness and powerlessness to be somewhat synonymous, and equate power with evil.
Not wanting to face such “evil” in yourself, you may then direct it outward and transfer it to another area.
As a society you may project it upon the criminal, as a nation upon a foreign country.
As an individual you may place this power upon an employer, a labor union, or any other segment of society.
In whatever areas you choose, you will feel relatively weak in comparison with the strength that you have projected outward.
You meet your own denied power whenever you find yourself in a situation where you feel weak in comparison to another person or situation that frightens you.
Power does not basically imply superiority over.
There is the power of love, and the power to love.
Both imply great action and vitality, and an aggressive thrust that has nothing to do with violence.
Yet many people have physical symptoms or suffer unpleasant situations because they are afraid to utilize their own power of action, and equate power with aggression – meaning violence.
Such feelings arouse artificial guilts.
The individual who speaks out most loudly for the death penalty feels that he himself should really be condemned to death, to pay for the great aggression (violence) within him that he dares not express.
Love is propelled by all of the elements of natural aggression, and it is powerful; yet because you have made such divisions between good and evil, love appears to be weak and violence strong.
Society, not understanding the nature of normal aggression, considers it violent.
Natural aggression is simply the power to act.”16
Violence You do is Violence to Yourself
“The violence that you do, you do to yourself.
You are a part of All That Is – of all the nature that you know and experience, of the world that you know, and even a part of the world that you know that you do not like.
If you rip off the wing of a fly, you are yourself less.
If you purposefully, or with malice, step upon an ant, then to the extent of your malice you step upon yourself all unknowing.
Violence will always be used creatively, but if you do not understand this – and at your present rate of development you do not – then any violence is violence against yourself.
This applies to each of you, for when you think in terms of violence you think in terms of malice or aggression.
Despite all man does, he cannot really work any destruction – but while he believes in destruction, then to that extent he minimizes what he is, and must work harder to use creativity.”17
“The Compassionate Buddha said more than two thousand years ago, ‘Hatred will never cease by hatred at any time. Hatred ceases only through love. This is an eternal law.’ We can never bring an end to violence by using violent means; far from resolving conflicts, hostility and retaliation drive people further apart and make havoc of life.”18
No Justification for Violence
“There is never any justification for violence.
There is no justification for hatred.
There is no justification for murder.
Those who indulge in violence for whatever reason are themselves changed, and the purity of their purpose adulterated.
It is wrong to curse a flower and wrong to curse a man.
It is wrong not to hold any man in honor, and it is wrong to ridicule any man.
You must honor yourselves and see within yourselves the spirit of eternal validity.
You must honor all other individuals, because within each is the spark of this validity.
As long as one person commits acts of violence for the sake of peace, you will have war.
When you curse another, you curse yourselves, and the curse returns to you.
When you are violent, the violence returns.”19
“The unity underlying life is so complete and pervasive that when we inflict suffering on the smallest creature, we injure the whole. When we refrain from habits that harm others, when we take up jobs that relieve suffering, when we work to put an end to anger and separateness, we strengthen the whole.”20
Violence
“In your society and to some extent in others, the natural communication of aggression has broken down.
You confuse violence with aggression, and do not understand aggression’s creative activity or its purpose as a method of communication to prevent violence.
You deliberately make great effort to restrain the communicative elements of aggression while ignoring its many positive values, until its natural power becomes dammed up, finally exploding into violence.
Violence is a distortion of aggression.
Violence is not aggressive. It is instead a passive surrender to emotion which is not understood or evaluated, only feared, and at the same time sought.
Violence is basically an overwhelming surrender, and in all violence there is a great degree of suicidal emotion, the antithesis of creativity.
Both killer and victim in a war are caught up in the same kind of passion, but the passion is not aggressive. It is its opposite – the desire for destruction.
Know that yearning is made up of feelings of despair caused by a sense of powerlessness, not of power.
Aggressiveness leads to action, to creativity and to life. It does not lead to destruction, violence or annihilation.
Your mind and your body are quite equipped to handle aggression.
Violence occurs only when the natural expression of aggression has been short-circuited.
The sense of power felt during such episodes is the result of repressed energy suddenly released, but the individual is always at the mercy of that energy then – submerged within it, and passively carried with it.
The fear of your own emotions can do far more damage than their expression, because the apprehension builds up a charge that intensifies the energy behind them.
Because of the basic concept held by some, that holds aggressiveness and power as one, the strength to act automatically means the strength to be aggressive. Here aggression is equated with violence.”21
Violence & Power
“Your own attitude about these issues will tell you much about yourself and influence your own personal reality.
If you agree that violence is power then you will punish the criminal with great vindictiveness, for you will see life as a power struggle, and will concentrate upon the acts of violence about which you read.
This may bring such aspects into your personal life, so that you yourself meet with violence – hence deepening your conviction.
If you accept the basic idea that evil is more powerful than good, then your beneficial acts will bear little fruit because of your own framework; you assign such small power of action to them.”22
“Violence, war, pollution, estrangement, and insensitivity to our fellow creatures are external manifestations of the disunity seething in our consciousness. Because we live on the surface level of life we are often unaware of the anger and fear burning deep within us…We can learn to descend into the depth of our consciousness where we can observe these negative forces at work and put an end to their disruptive activity.
When the divisiveness which has been agitating us and making life difficult begins to mend, we get immediate evidence in our daily life: our health improves, long-standing personal conflicts subside, our mind becomes clear and our intellect lucid; an unshakeable sense of security and well-being follows us wherever we go, and whatever challenges loom before us, we know we have the will and the wisdom to meet them effectively.”23
- Easwaran, Eknath, The End of Sorrow: The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, Vol I, Nilgiri Press, 1975
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- ibid.
- Easwaran, Eknath, The End of Sorrow: The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, Vol I, Nilgiri Press, 1975
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- Roberts, Jane, Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1972
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- Easwaran, Eknath, The End of Sorrow: The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, Vol I, Nilgiri Press, 1975
- American Psychological Association, Encyclopedia of Psychology, http://www.apa.org/topics/anger/
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- ibid.
- Easwaran, Eknath, The End of Sorrow: The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, Vol I, Nilgiri Press, 1975
- Elkins, Rueckert, McCarty, The Law of One, Session 46.9, http://www.lawofone.info/results.php?s=46
- ibid.
- Easwaran, Eknath, The End of Sorrow: The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, Vol I, Nilgiri Press, 1975
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- Roberts, Jane, Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1986
- Easwaran, Eknath, The End of Sorrow: The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, Vol I, Nilgiri Press, 1975
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- Easwaran, Eknath, The End of Sorrow: The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, Vol I, Nilgiri Press, 1975
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974.
- ibid.
- Easwaran, Eknath, The End of Sorrow: The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, Vol I, Nilgiri Press, 1975
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