Angry Questions

On Saturday past the dharma talk in the Sangha was about anger. This seems to be a real issue for many people. It generates deep questions. When did anger evolve and what is it good for? Is it adaptive and functional or is it collateral damage left over from the evolution of something else?

It appears that anger is most commonly prompted by thwarts to the doings of ‘I’ or ‘mine’. It can be cheekily ennobled to the level of “righteous anger” when it deals with moral issues. But who puts the right in righteous? (Ref – Haidt “The Righteous Mind”)

We are social animals and we each belong to a culture with sub cultural variations. Some combination of nature, nurture and serendipity will have caused us (consciously and unconsciously) to adopt this rather than that point of view and pattern of values. Although we are each unique we are at the same time representative of our culture and subculture.

Sometimes we stand for ‘I’. Sometimes we stand for ‘we’. Normally we are opposed to ‘them’; and the nearby them are more of a threat than the far away ones.

But what is anger? It is an abstract concept rather than a real thing. This becomes obvious when you ask:

• What is its shape and colour?
• How big is it?
• How long does it last?
• If it leaves the attention centre for a while and then comes back is it the same “thing” that comes back?
• Where does it go to at the end of a session?

In Saturday’s Sangha there were several ideas about how to deal with anger but most people agreed that Thay’s approach was often effective. This involves taking the viewpoint of an imaginary, internal witness who notices anger arising and can therefore say, “Hello my little friend anger, how are you today?” This creates a split in “consciousness” where the angry me has to share space in the attention centre with the calm me. The calm me refuses to let the angry me monopolise the attention centre and this causes a partial defusing of the anger. To summarise – refuse and defuse

Note that the imaginary, internal witness can also deal with other thoughts and feelings – good, bad and neutral. I have found it useful over the years to imagine a “cool dude” who notices what is going in and out of the attention centre and can get involved where necessary to refuse and defuse my stone age instincts.


When you are on autopilot a particular type of stimulus will cause a particular type of reaction. This is because your genetic nature has hard wired your mindbrain by creating inbuilt neural pathways to ensure that stimulus x generates reaction x. There are huge numbers of these inborn reflexes and instincts. (eg we close our eyes when we sneeze). Note that there are also learned responses that operate from the unconscious (eg after having learned to drive a car)

But the cool dude can step in to slow things down (Ref  Daniel Kahneman “Thinking Fast and Slow”). Thus stimulus x will eventually generate response y. “Please engage brain before opening mouth”. “He who knows does not speak.”

These radical thoughts may be upsetting people and causing anger to rise in them. So I might be as well to stop for the moment. The longest of journeys go one step at a time.