Anger Sharks and Is Anger Ever Justified?

To give life to my wayward metaphor. 

Found on google images, failed to find original source

I've been thinking about the concept of anger mostly as it shows itself in annoyance/irritation. One idea I have is that it is possible to avoid such negative states altogether, or to only experience the tiniest fragments of it. The idea is that anger is like a spark that leads to a fire which turns into an inferno. It is possible to stamp out the spark upon its arrival in the mind. If one is mindful, attentive to their thoughts and bodily sensations, one can catch the seed of anger before it becomes an inferno. Oddly enough the technique for dissolving anger is somewhat indirect. As the anger forms, their may be associations that come with it and it is possible to bypass these reactions simply by focusing on one's breath. So you notice that you're feeling hints of anger, then you jump into a concentrated state and though the anger may get a few words/phrases/images in, your focus on the breath pushes everything else to your periphery. So the anger simply dies out, it may go through its usual spin cycle of rumination but it's a far away conversation or more like an ambulance passing by, it comes up loudly at first, then it dopplers its way on out of your life.

That's one way to do it but I guess it does not fully dissolve the anger, it just doesn't feed it anymore. As far as behavior brought on by anger, the basic concentration technique can combat that altogether, but there is still an internal piece of anger that can sit beneath the surface and, if we lapse in our attentiveness, can break through into our behavior again.

The vippassanna technique of observing one's sensations and noting them takes the dissolution process one step further by putting anger in the same category as all the other sensations. When you start to note every little sensation as it arises in consciousness, you spontaneously get  a sense that these sensations are "not you/not coming from you", they clearly don't last, and that holding onto them causes us to suffer. Sounds like some weird claims here but I've had some experience with this, albeit brief. I don't exactly know what happens when you get further along with this particular practice, but it is likely that one will dissociate more and more with one's negative mental states including anger.

The third technique is the build up of positive associations. The idea is to generate positive states regarding oneself, people, events, etc. This practice is a non-neutral reinterpretation of one's experience but we can find reasons to associate with things positively while acknowledging the practical aspects of life. For example, you may feel compassionate for someone who has done you wrong, but you're practical enough not to put yourself in harm's way if such circumstances can be avoided.

Okay so I've written about those techniques several times already in previous posts but I wanted to go over them again to establish that there are at least 3 ways one can dissolve anger before it becomes something that we act on, or even before we can suffer from the feeling of it. In fact, the highest ideal level of at least one of these practices suggests that we can eradicate negative mental states like anger altogether (though this a lofty goal that would take a lot of skill/time).

When asking people about whether anger was justified or not I expected some more straightforward arguments from people. Instead I got an exasperated "hello, anger is not an optional thing". More than one person told me that it's something that is inevitable, that we are stuck with it, that it is natural. Anger, in Buddhist thought, is one of the big no-nos. At the very least, the goal is to never express any outward signs of anger because it is a form of violence toward others. And sure, perhaps monks are seething beneath the surface and suffer internally with anger sometimes. That has to be the case for some novice monks anyway, I must say that personally I experience the dissolution of my anger for short periods of time when I am consistent with my meditation practice. If I skip a few days, it's like getting cast out to sea and I lose my way. Sometimes I get bitten and thrashed around by an anger shark until I can make my way back to the shore, bloodied up and in pain. To continue this analogy, consistent practice would be like heading in the opposite direction of the sea, getting as far away from it as I can by perhaps climbing to the highest mountain. So no matter what might be happening, it is going to take a lot of time and effort for me to get bitten by an anger shark again.

I started writing about anger a month or so ago to talk mainly about how irritation/aversion arises. I've reworked my presentation a bunch of times, left it, came back to it. It is now post-election right now and I'm seeing a lot of angry people reacting to what has happened. Maybe this post can help people out who are caught up in an angry or other averse state of mind. Also I hope no one confuses my condemnation of anger as acceptance for the current political state of affairs. I believe action is required, but mindful action, never in anger.