Q. How may we overcome anger?
A. By giving up the idea of righteous anger, that is, of the efficacy of anger as a fruitful force in achieving righteous ends. However, the one constitutionally prone to emotional excitement and expression thereof is very much more culpable to anger when he is thwarted in the fulfilment of his desired ends than the one who is by nature calm and collected and less given to emotional excesses. For the former, anger often is a lifelong companion and a crude one at that. He may be forced to reduce it as he ages, out of health compulsions, when he sees that his body and the brain can no more cope with the sudden onrush of blood consequent on anger. Also, emotional maturity and understanding of life in a higher light help one to inculcate the attributes of forgiveness and detachment which significantly help reduce anger. Besides all these, regularized, routinised living incorporated with disciplined hours of meditation, chanting, prayer and other spiritual practices harmonize the human system and even out the irregularities periodically building up therein to reduce stress significantly and this, is turn, reduces the propensity towards anger. Proper ethical training ought to be imparted at the school level and reinforced later at different stages of life periodically to make one ever remember that one is not the Lord of the universe to have an entitlement to be sitting in judgement over others and passing verdict on their actions or attitudes in terms of violent verbal volleys termed 'anger'. Anger is the result of uncontrolled emotions getting the better of oneself and must be recognized as a weakness during the formative years of one's life by elders and teachers instead of being lauded as a virile virtue denoting a thunderous personality worthy of emulation. Dissociate virtue from anger, recognize it as a temporary nervous debility and half the battle to control it is won. A final point and that is what the yoga sutras of Patanjali state on this issue. Whenever a wave of anger is about to pass through the mind, raise an opposite wave, that of love, to counteract the former wave. This is a most effective way of neutralising a rising current of anger. Prolonged yogic training leads to pacification of the mental impulses at will and the sublimation of nefarious thought patterns into integral divine thinking. Anger is then checked at source, absorbed and transformed into higher intellectual and spiritual energy. At an even higher level of spiritual evolution, the very impulse of the depth-mind that would eventually show up at the surface-mind as anger is given a creative, harmonic direction and anger is, so to say, 'nipped in the bud'. The sincere soul surely succeeds in controlling anger but, alas, after a hard, hard struggle.
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