Anger Blog 3

Looking into the mirror of anger.

This is the third in a series of blogs exploring negative emotion in general and the nature of anger in particular. This blog contains some deeply personal reflections on my relationship with my father and some of the implications of his harrowing experiences as a Japanese prisoner of war from 1942 to 1945.

This blog reflects a growing insight with regard to”arrogation”. Arrogation is a process by which all human selves function. A key part of the process explores how arrogation can lead us to identify with a negative emotion, in this case anger and how it creates a trap in which we arrogate to ourselves an undue sense of responsibility. Quite frankly observing my own arrogation process makes me squirm in discomfort at times. However a growing freedom and insight makes bearing such discomfort infinitely worthwhile.

I wrote the following to myself on a train journey to Lancaster shortly after an intense personal struggle with a bout of debilitating anger. I wanted desperately to deepen my understanding of the arrogation aspects of anger. I had a dim realization that somehow the experience that I had recently suffered in the grip of anger was a form of self-indulgence with the attendant ego-related suffering that comes with it. I guess I am giving myself an uncompromisingly  good telling-off in this piece!

The emotion of anger will kill you and not the enemy! The martial arts invariably make it clear that the negative emotion of anger will ultimately weaken you.

Anger is a negative emotion. All negative human emotions have within them some life energy. What makes them negative energies is the way that they restrict and obstruct the flow of life energy. You are gripped by anger. To relinquish the restriction and the holdings is to release the binds of negative emotion and ultimately, to open the gateway to Acceptance. To pass through this gateway will open up an unrestricted view of the possible positive human emotions. Positive emotions are no longer negative and can become positive in as much that they now offer no struggle or resistance to the free flow of life-energy. Positive emotions spring out of Willingness. That is why positive emotions have an integrity that negative emotion do not possess. The positive energies not only do not obscure and restrict Life energy, but they  positively enhance and facilitate it. Because positive human emotions have integrity, the positive emotions: courage, acceptance, willingness, forbearance, forgiveness, love and compassion, will always strengthen and never weaken the human mind and body.

The negative emotion of anger contains considerable reserves of viable life energy – as do all human emotions to varying degrees. This restricted and contained energy can be used to move in a positive direction in order to escape the willful binds that obstruct you from moving toward willingness. However usable the life energy, negative emotion remains restricted. It is the restrictions that need to draw your attention. To move in a positive direction: away from a restrictive negative emotion involves letting go of the binds and restrictions. It is the restrictions that need to draw your attention in order eventually to be free from the tight grip of anger. While this is simple it is never easy! To look directly into the mirror of a powerful negative emotions such as your anger is a huge challenge. So what stands in the way? To begin with it is first necessary to first stop projecting the negative emotion of anger onto others and also to stop listening to the narrative story that is telling you why this must be so. This is never easy but it will open things up to enable you then to go further in using that available energy in order to move it in a positive and healing direction. Every tiny letting-go enables a movement in the direction of Willingness. Not to look into the mirror is to continue to be inevitably gripped and held by the tense fist of anger.  To be mired down and stuck in this way is to continue to be poisoned by a caustic and corrosive toxicity – that may, over the long haul, indeed, ultimately kill you!

You are swamped and poisoned by anger. The energy that puffs you up to strike out in anger is sourced in pride and vanity. The inevitable sufferings that you feel are ego-pain. In this way bouts of anger can be better understood for just what they are: as an ego-indulgence. This can create a particularly insidious trap, a tricky downward spiral that is sourced in spiritual pride. The vicious spiral of spiritual pride involves a downward convoluted vortex in which you become disappointed and mad at yourself for becoming angry! This makes it extremely hard for you to own and embrace your anger. It makes it difficult to look into the mirror of your anger and to break out of a vicious downward spiral.

The pressure-cooker like build-up of energy in anger creates anything but a desire to a look into the mirror!  With great vehemence and indignation you turn away from the mirror: You project your anger out onto others – who are wrong. The heavily judgmental polarity of right and wrong here is part of an essential ego-duality of self and other. Anger inevitably creates a separation. This pressure inevitably builds up to express itself in rage, resentment, spite, malice, violence aggression, vindictiveness, vengeance, violence, vehemence, indignation, hatred and hurt.

 The pressure to strike out in anger has its roots like the ego itself, in survival and in self-protection. However anger is a form of self-centredness or arrogation. To understand the importance of arrogation in anger has potential to help you to break you out of the suffering trap that it creates. You can then move on to access and use the energy in anger to form the wherewithal, the courage necessary to look into the mirror. This can lead you then to ask the open Life affirming questions:

What right now, in this angry state is weakening and blocking me?

What is it that is pinning me down and restricting my life energies?

This type of questioning creates the beginnings of relinquishment: of a letting go of the binding force of anger. The first acknowledgment in working with arrogation is always one of forbearance for your self. To have a self is to be selfish and self-indulgent. To open up to arrogation  means you can begin to respond rather than react. It is to look into the mirror without feeling bad about feeling bad! The foundation that this creates may eventually lead on to self-forgiveness and compassion, first for your self. Later this can extend outward toward others like ripples in the pool. It is impossible to give to others what you  do not possess for yourself.

When I arrived at Lancaster I had about a quarter an hour before my work began so I took the chance to quietly to reflect on what I had just written. I was overwhelmed at the presence of my Dad during these meditative moments. This was a great surprise. Even though the link is now pretty obvious, it took me the best part of the rest of the day before I began to understand the link between his insistent presence and my recent personal struggles with anger.

Dad’s Anger

When Singapore fell to the invading Japanese forces in 1942 my father was taken prisoner and for the next 4 years he was a captive prisoner-of-war in various prison camps in Japan. It was during this time that he was tortured and shot for stealing rice in order to survive. He saw many of his comrades tortured and executed, often they died from the starvation, the diseases and other privations besides the callous brutality of their Japanese captors. My Dad survived and therefore I came into existence in large part because of his intense anger and hatred toward the Japanese. This hatred and anger was a powerful and formative axis of my childhood. I recall one occasion when I received “a good hiding” because I innocently played with a couple of Korean kids. He was outraged that I should play with such slanty eyed little bastards!  I get a sense that his captors had won as he beat me in the same way that hisJapanese captors had beaten him.

Although at the time of my meditative moments, my Dad had been dead for 20 years, his insistent presence that morning became a powerful reminder that the will to prevail by virtue of anger and hatred can be an intrinsic part of the energy needed to survive during desperately challenging and often brutal circumstances.It is interesting and significant that Dad’s persistent but quiet pacing around in my head that morning did not in any way bring with it an ethos of hatred and anger. It was a peaceful, tender, somewhat pensive energy of forgiveness and reconciliation. He walked patiently back and forth in my mind’s eye gently holding his chin while tapping his upper lip with the side of his crocked right index finger. Wordlessly he seemed to be waiting for me to make an important  connection.

Dad’s reconciliation with Anger

I first began to remember that my Dad did not eventually die with the intense anger of recrimination. Toward the end of his life he found his own way to a peaceful reconciliation. He told me that if he could live his life over again he would certainly go through his experiences as a Japanese prisoner of war. He would suffer this again because of the gift of comradeship that he had experienced from his fellow prisoners of war. It may have taken a long time but eventually he was able to take the energy of hatred and anger and use it positively and to move on. He even did what would have been unthinkable in the days of my childhood and he bought himself a Japanese car!! I sensed that eventually he began to understand the place and purpose of anger in helping him to survive his four years of captivity.

Many prisoners of war who suffered privation and starvation as a result of their captivity were rendered impotent by their POW camp experiences. My birth shortly after the Second World War was the occasion for a special relief, joy and delight!

In the days of my childhood there was nothing remotely akin to the contemporary understanding of war related post-traumatic stress disorders. In fact at home Dad’s horrifying war experiences were not much mentioned. However the family was very much aware of the terrifying nightmares that Dad often experienced, although once again they were not much talked about. It is interesting how the greater the callous and brutal the treatment that the Japanese meted out to their captive prisoners of war, the more it strengthened bonds of comradeship and friendship among fellow prisoners of war. The chances of survival improved with this resilient process.

Dad’s POW Comrade: Shared dreams with Billy

Over this challenging time Dad developed a special and an extraordinary friendship with fellow POW called Billy Argyle.  They were very much opposite personalities. Dad, the practical man helped Billy with day-to-day survival while Billy Argyle the maths teacher and man of letters would keep the two of them stimulated with philosophical conundrums, mathematics and problem solving puzzles.

A strange phenomena that was much discussed around our dining table in my childhood home was the extraordinary accounts of Billy Argyle and my Dad having identical dreams at the same time. There were numerous stories of letters that would cross in the post in which they would relate the extraordinary details of these shared and identical dreams- not all of them nightmares! Their experiences in Japanese prisoner of war camps did seem to link them together in the most extraordinary way.

In 1991 my Dad became mysteriously ill. He was five days in hospital. After various  tests  the doctors could find no physical reason for his illness. Towards the end of his hospital stay we ldiscovered that Billy Argyle had become suddenly ill and had died while Dad was in hospital.

The start of Dad’s weekly lessons with me

Although my Dad and I were close, the anger and resentment had created a certain distance between us. I wrote the following letter to Dad while Dad was in hospital. As I make clear in this letter: at that time I had recently been with a friend who was dying and my friend was regretting difficulties he had experienced in his life as a result of not being emotionally truthful. In his dying wish Ron Anderton begged of me not to fall into the same trap.

Dear Dad

I was really sad to hear about Billy Argyle’s death.
 You might not have spent a lot of time together recently but it didn’t stop you from being inseparable pals. Comradeship and friendship in the circumstances that you lived through together is extraordinary and something I can only get a dim sense of with a leap of my imaginationWhen you experience life intensely and deeply, the experience can become eternal and can somehow break out of the barriers of time.

Perhaps you were dying with Bill while you were in hospital. Now he has left you as a survivor. It becomes clear to me that there is nothing more valuable in this world than friendship and love. In fact ”Love is the only bridge and the only survivor.”

I was feeling very low in spirits this morning while driving to work. It was the day of a funeral of a friend Ron Anderton. My leap of imagination with regard to your extraordinary comradeship and friendship has made me feel much better. Yes! Maybe it was just a coincidence that you were so ill while your friend Billy lay dying. It remains true that, irrational as these things are, nonetheless this leap of imagination has really lifted my spirits. You see – how powerfully the mind and imagination can heal and rebuild things.

I went to Ron Anderton’s funeral today. I was with him just before he died and he admitted to me that he had not always being emotionally truthful in his life and he greatly regretted this. It took a great heave of courage for him to make the admission. He went on to beg me to tell my own emotional truth. I am beginning to learn to own my own feelings and to be honest about expressing them. That is why I’m writing this and sending it to you and not just thinking or mooching about it as I usually do.

I had really been looking forward to us working together to finish the jobs on the back of house. It is disappointing that you have been temporarily laid up. However it strikes me that perhaps another door is opening for us both here. Perhaps we can work together in a different way. The work I do explores a middle way. It involves learning to pace activity, how to stay back and to listen and pat attention to your body and how to rest intelligently. It’s all about remembering and discipline. There’s really nothing new at all in this work. It is more than just my work, it is my life.I love you very much.
 How hard it is to say such a thing- but I do feel so much better for saying it.

John

Anger and a transformation of my relationship with my Dad

There were some seismic shifts in my life and in my relationship with my father around that time. It is only now that I have begun to appreciate fully how closely the seismic shifts were linked to two significant deaths. Dad never directly mentioned to me my letter. Although Mum told me he just once referred to it to her  as “John’s lovely letter.” However shortly after receiving it he booked in for the first of many lessons with me. Dad had a regular lesson most Wednesdays for the next six years until his death in 1997.

There was nothing particularly seismic about that first session of work together. It was what happened immediately afterwards that was humorous and curious. As were most of the sessions we were to have together, the first session had about it an intimate stillness in which the direct contact of touch opens-up a direct channel of silent connection and communication. There was a lot of tension and holding in Dad’s shoulders. It released and let go -but only a very little but it was a start. While it was tenderly sad to lose the physical presence of my father in my life when six years later he eventually died, it is of greatest importance to my work and to my life that “Love the Bridge and the only the Survivor” remains. When to my utter surprise Dad became so very present in my recent meditation on anger, it was an ethos not of anger but of stillness and silent connection that filled my reflective moments with Dad’s presence. What was he wanting to remind me about?

It was a ”nuts and bolts” opening first session with Dad that affirms, as most first lessons do, that letting go is simple but never easy. What happened immediately after reflected exactly how much the tectonic plates had shifted in our relationship.When that first session came to close I left Dad and I wandered off on my own into the front garden. When I came back into the house after a few minutes I met with my Mum. She said:

”Where’s your Dad? I thought he was with you. What have you done with him?”

“Perhaps he’s upstairs in the bathroom.” I said.” I will give him a shout.”

No. He was not upstairs. And so we set about trying to find him.  Eventually we found him lying prone on the concrete floor of the back-yard with his right arm up to his armpit down the drain. As he withdrew his hand he appeared to have a long shiny slimy black glove stretching almost to his armpit. Dad had “a thing” about unblocking drains. As he stood up he proceeded to give me a rich, round, purple angry telling off for allowing my storm drain to become so blocked. This reflected a settling down of the shifting tectonic plates. Mum shot me a knowing Mona Lisa style smile. Mum called these rages: Dad’s shouting and bawling.  She shot me a knowing glance as then she said:

”Shall we all have a nice cup of tea?”

Until my recent tussle with anger in my life I had largely forgotten about Dad and how much those 6 years of sessions we had experienced together in his later life had meant to me. Those particular sessions involved precious few words. However I now well recall how after one of those sessions, Dad surprised me by opening up to say that his many bouts of rage and anger were “a form of self-indulgence.” This kind of self-reflective talk was highly uncharacteristic! Now this stands out as having a great significance for me. It reminds me that the Bridge is still there.
Anger has its place but Love survives.