Rage: Clutching a Burning Coal
August 11, 2023 Rage is everywhere we look today. The reasons are numerous, but the symptom is singular: as a society, we are losing the ability, or quite possibly the wish, to control our anger and, sadly, our rage.
We see evidence of this all around us. We read of how a knife-wielding man rampaged through a primary school, killing children because of his failed romance, and of an airplane passenger who screamed obscenities at and then hit a flight attendant over a face-mask dispute. We hear of a furious social-media zealot who emailed school board members and branded them as morons and child abusers. We witnessed it in the TV footage of people in combat gear attacking police officers, surging up the steps, scaling the walls, shattering windows and battering down doors, breaking into the United States Capital Building.
Casting around for a way to understand how things have gotten this bad, we suggest various reasonable causes: untreated mental health issues, a rapidly-fluctuating global economy, the polarization of political ideologies, the pervasive presence of drugs and alcohol, isolation due to the covid pandemic. We point to the proliferation of handguns and military-grade assault weapons in some places and the ease of obtaining knives and machetes in others.
All these are genuine factors, conditions that can trigger or play a part in what seems to have become the automatic default response of far too many people—rage. A seemingly endless, mind-numbing, ever-increasing flow of rage. But they are not the underlying factors.
Mental health issues do not only occur in certain countries. Sadly, they are a worldwide occurrence, present in almost every community. Not every person who yells at or strikes out at others has mental health issues, and those who do struggle with such issues often find themselves victims of violence, not its perpetrators.
Not everyone who feels humiliated or irrelevant grabs a weapon and goes on a rampage. Countless people experience the erratic driver who cuts them off on a highway but don’t explode in road rage. Others read or view things on social media or the Internet they strongly disagree with, but they do not resort to comments with the primary goal of inflicting pain.
So why, when many people manage to refrain from rage, do increasing numbers choose to act from it? Choose? Yes. Rage is a choice. It is, however, not a conscious one where we methodically consider the circumstances, list our various options, and then decide to go with rage.
We have been choosing to explode in anger for countless lifetimes. Our anger now erupts instantly because we have reinforced it so much that it has become a habit, our automatic default reaction when things fail to go our way. And we hurt.
When we hurt, when we are in emotional pain, we rarely make the wisest choices. We just want the pain to stop, the humiliation to end, the fear to diminish, the loneliness to go away. We want the person or persons who we perceive as having caused our suffering to pay. We crave revenge, thinking the other person’s pain will end our own.
But it never does.
Consider the Buddha’s analogy of two arrows. The first arrow is our pain—of all sorts and of all degrees, the causes of which are multifaceted and endless. The second arrow is our suffering—what we tell ourselves about the pain. Someone else shot that first arrow. Or we may just have told ourselves they did.
But the second? We shot that one. And all the subsequent ones. We continue to wound ourselves until the need to stop the pain overwhelms us with thoughts of getting even. We tell ourselves that if we retaliate forcefully enough, our pain will be deflected back to the person who caused it. Our suffering will be over.
But, of course, this never works. Surrounded by the bodies, metaphorical or heartbreakingly real, it is not relief that we feel. Emptiness perhaps. Futility. A whole new quiver of arrows at the realization that we are still overwhelmed by suffering. Different. But still everywhere we turn. We had told ourselves we were acting in the name of what was right. We had judged that a wrong needed avenging. Thus fortified, we meted out our chosen punishment.
And yet, after all this, here we are—still angry. As the Buddha said in another analogy, holding on to our anger is like grasping a lump of burning coal while waiting to throw it at another person. They have already gone on their way, oblivious to our continuing fury. With our hand still holding on to the hot burning coal, we are the one who gets burned. We are the one who suffers.
How did so many people come to be so bitter and vengeful? We used to be more civilized. I'm not talking about a century ago, but just years ago. We recognized individual rights, but at the same time, valued being part of something larger. We considered the interests and desires of others, not just our own. It was a time before everyone was glued to screens—TVs, computers, smartphones—for hours every day.
It was a time when we had more face-to-face interactions with others and could better gauge their reactions. We could read their body language and expressions, and gauge their responses. We had a chance to see when our words, careless or intentional, had hurt them. The opportunity to see the consequences of what we said. Embarrassed at being caught or horrified at having been so unaware, we could and would try to repair the harm we had just inflicted.
Today, face-to-face is being replaced by screen-to-screen and text-to-text. Not witnessing the hurt we just caused, it is easy for us to become careless. Not seeing the consequences of our heedless words, we lose the ability to gauge how a listener or reader is reacting. Emboldened by our anonymity, we can become callous. Disconnected from personal social interactions, we become increasingly isolated and put our own interests ahead of those of others. And even when we get to the point where we can see the suffering we are causing, we may find that we have reached the point where we no longer care.
Our concern is only for ourselves. Minor inconveniences find fertile ground to grow into humiliations and threats to our very being. We reach for our weapon of choice: an anonymous retort, a hateful tirade, a malicious lie. A fist. A knife, or a gun.
What can we do instead? We can remind ourselves that we are not the only unhappy one. That we do not have to argue or fight with those who hold different ideas and beliefs, that we do not have to be right all the time. That maybe what we think we just heard wasn’t what the speaker meant. And then, we can re-evaluate what we have told ourselves about forgiveness.
Perhaps we have told ourselves that forgiveness only benefits the one who hurt us, that it does nothing for "me." And that it lets those who have offended, embarrassed, or harmed us off the hook. Actually, it can benefit both of us by providing some much-needed karmic closure.
When we allow our animosity toward another person to fester, it will grow. What if, instead, we let go of our bitterness for another person? What if we forgive them? The karmic result will depend on how complete our forgiveness is. If we forgive a little, we can reduce our bitterness a little. The more wholehearted our forgiveness, the more we reduce this animosity. By forgiving completely, the animosity is ended. We could even become friends.
We will still have to undergo the bad retributions we set into motion with our past actions, but the bitterness will be gone. We will be repaying that karmic debt, not adding to it. If we had known and acted on all this in the past, we wouldn't be here, yet again, offended, embarrassed, or hurt by this person.
Another benefit of forgiveness is that when we finally calm down, we'll find that since, fundamentally, our true nature is the same as that of Buddhas, we are by nature good. So when we act from our true nature, letting someone off the hook accords with our nature. Doing what we innately know to be good is such a relief!
So very different from when we are angry. When angry, our heart beats faster and we’re constantly agitated. We can't sleep or concentrate on our work. Having a more negative state of mind, we find that minor inconveniences become major irritations. Everything bothers us. Forgiveness can eliminate such problems, so it doesn't just benefit the other person. It benefits us as well.
What if the thought of letting someone off the hook through forgiveness isn't what's holding us back? What if we don't want to forgive because we see the act of forgiving someone as weakness? And we don’t want to be weak, we want to be strong! A strong person seeks revenge. Thus assuring ourselves that strength and revenge are the way to go, we denounce forgiveness as the easy way out.
Easy?
Hardly!
Unless we find ourselves in a situation where our forgiveness arises naturally, and inspiring instances of such will be provided in upcoming talks, most of us find forgiveness to be hard. Too often, the moment we consider forgiving the other person, our anger surges. We suppress it. It erupts again. Such emotional wrestling is exhausting. Screaming, throwing something, emailing a hateful screed, they're easy. Calming down and responding in a civil, thoughtful way takes work. But it will bring so much relief.
A family, a community, a society cannot long survive if its members are self-centered, vindictive, and unable to forgive. The barriers we erect out of our selfishness and intolerance will not protect us, nor will they bring us the better life we believed could be ours.
Forgiveness will.
