Welcome to Day II of Buddhist Week! Today, I’m continuing the theme of Learning to Like People. I promise the post isn’t as cheesy as the title. In fact, it’s mainly about anger, hatred, and how to we must control it. It’s pretty humbling and eye opening. I hope you find it as beneficial and life changing as I do!
Hate = Anger
Anger is the most common deluded state of mind. A view that a person or a thing is flawed. Feelings in response is inflicted by said person / thing. We see them / it as the cause of our pain and suffering. Which in turn is pain on a misconception. If we hate someone, does it change them or stop them from recreating the action? Hate won’t change or do anything. It doesn’t contribute a solution. If anything, it makes things worse.
What’s done is done
And until we can accept it, we can’t move on. We can’t hate people into behaving or changing. Anger is the most destructive states of mind. It has the power to destroy spiritual experiences. It doesn’t allow you to experience peace or happiness.
Apply effort to control anger, otherwise it’ll become habit. Anger will become natural. Everything in life works on familiarity because we are creatures of habit. There are a lot of benefits to controlling anger. Because if not, if we’re familiar with anger, we’re rarely delighted or relaxed.
Hatred = Poison
Anger is like fire, if we catch it as soon as it arises in the mind, we can stop it. We can control it. We need to watch for it and catch it. In order to do this, we need to turn our mind inward, where we’ll become aware of where our mind is going. If we see anger begin to take root, begin seeing faults in others (or even places or things), begin exaggerating faults, obsessively focusing on wrong doings, situations… when we begin to see all that in our mind? DO SOMETHING.
If we see the inner fire, extinguish it! We practice ‘non-hatred.’ The key to our difficulties is our response. That determines if we have a problem. How we think about something, and label something will determine if we have a ‘problem’ or not.
Spiritual Awakening = Internal Wealth
Begin to value and cultivate your inner wealth; strength, peace, wisdom, patience, love, compassion, integrity. It’ll make it much easier to cherish things and view the world with a positive state of mind.
People who help develop these qualities in us are key. They give us ‘rubber-meets-the-road moments’. Do we have these inner wealth qualities or not? We want improvement. Every person we meet that ‘challenges’ us, is more like a mental fitness coach — they’ll help cultivate our inner wealth.