Wholesome 8===D

As I was walking to the bus stop a young man approched me and said "Can I ask you a question?" I paused for a second and responded "What kind of question?" Then he asked "Do you know what's going to happen when you die?"

I started to walk away, but after I took a few steps I was so pissed off I turned back around. I lost it. It got worse after some of his friends starting gathering around and one of them started chiming in. And when I say lost it, I mean lost it. I got so angry that I was shaking, swearing, and not making a lot of sense.

Afterwards I thought about why being asked that question pissed me off so much, and the story that seems to make the most sense to me is that it felt very condescending and disrespectful. I was also pissed off about a article on nominated for deletion on wikipedia that the author keeps waring for. Ironically it's the article for a book on Satanism, which doesn't meet the notability requirements for books. Satanists also tend to rub me the wrong way, incidentally much more than Christians. So there was probably also some effects of displacement aggression in the exchange.

Why did I think it was a condescending question? It's kind of implied that he was asking me because he had information relevant to what happens to me in the afterlife that I didn't know about. Why else would he be asking? It's not like lawyers write wills on the side advertise like that on college campuses. The question was also crafted to play on emotions rather than being informative.

Why did I think it it disrespectful? Because it was a fake attempt at genuine human communication and connection. It was the first part of an obvious plan and set of questions that had been had been carefully crafted for a pre-determined goal. When I prodded a little be he got to the last of them and asked if I had accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior, which I have. I told him accepted him as my savior when I was six, but the more I think about it was probably more like four. Moreover I never renounced Jesus Christ as my savior either. None of that stops me from being an atheist now. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, Jesus Christ can continue to be my savior as long as he wants to be. :)


Reflecting on it, what it really brought up for me do is unresolved questions I have about anger. For a long time I've been going back and forth about the usefulness, appropriateness, and transformation of anger. Donald Rothberg (a Buddhist teacher) gave a talk about his most recent book, The Engaged Spiritual Life at the Insight Meditation Center in San Francisco (January 9th). I found his response to the second to last question very interesting, if it's all based on truth (fast forward to about 66:25 if you want to hear the exchange). He was asked a question relating to Martin Luther King Jr., the audience member commented that while King advocated non-violence when speaking to many groups his speech would get very angry and forceful. So she asked if Buddhists might have problems connecting to people because they try to be so gentle and calm that they don't connect to people who are really hurt. Here's what Donald said (roughly transcribed):

That's a great question. There's a lot there. In the book I actually devoted a lot of attention to themes related to your question. There's a whole chapter on anger. I believe that there is a lot of confusion among Buddhists about anger... I talked a little bit earlier about how working with anger is a central issue for any, as it were, socially engaged spiritual response. How we work with the anger that often is there when we sense something has been unjust or unfair or there is suffering occurring, is a is a really big theme -- a really big issue.

And the key-see (?) as I was mentioning, as much as I've explored it, is about opening to the anger in ways that transform the anger but preserve, in some way, the energy and the insight that is often is connected with anger. We can think of King. There was a lot of energy in observing injustice -- seeing it -- a lot of insight there.

King actually explicitly talked about [how] the movement he was part of hinges on the constructive transformation of anger -- he used that kind of language. I would look for some discriminations between a kind of anger that's reactive and what the transformed energy of anger looks like. I would suggest that some of what we hear in King's speeches may be the latter. That it may not be a simple kind of reactive anger. I don't think so. There's a kind of passion there. There's something there that is very energetic. It does have a lot to do with the style and language of the Southern African American Church, and so forth. But still, my sense is that he is channeling that energy but he's not necessarily polarizing himself against the people who are, as it were, the oppressors. So there's some really key differences between the typical reactive structure of, let's say, untransformed anger. So, that's a really crucial point.

I do believe that, that is very confusing for Buddhists... The chapter on anger is one of the favorite chapters -- I wrote about twice as much as I actually got published. I actually had to do some historical work. Because, one of my sections is called "a brief history of Western ambivalence towards anger." Because I think that there's considerable ambivalence. You can find it in the roots of Christianity, you can find it in Judaism. In the old testament God gets angry. And the prophets get really angry. Jesus gets angry with the money changers. St. Thomas Aquinas says that anger at injustice is a different kind -- it's not one of the seven deadly sins... Because anger, originally, was one of the seven deadly sins. ... I would see it less as a loophole and more of a recognition that it's a really important energy, and that when worked through, something different happens.

There are a lot of confusions among Buddhists -- some of it has to do with the translation... Basically, the Asian words that we translate as "anger" don't have the connotations as the Western cognates of "anger" in English and in other languages. The connotations are very different. The connotations of the words we translate as anger -- where you can read in Buddhist texts, you know, "anger is the biggest problem in the world" if you read the text. Or you read Shantideva, in The Guide to The Bodhisattva's Way of Life, he said something like "one moment of anger in the mind of the bodhisattva can set us back eons." Or something like that -- it's a very strong statement... What we find when we look closer at the words is that the connotations are much closer to hatred. Which makes some sense of why they're saying what they say.

The Dalai Lama was informed of some of these verbal distinctions. He said we should never translate any of the Asian words which are understood as defilements or afflictions, they are sometimes translated as kleshas in the Pāli or Sanskrit -- we should never translate that by anger... The Greeks called anger the moral emotion because especially an emotion that helped people know about violations of norms and boundaries.

I could say more, I could come and do a half day on anger.... I think that it's particularly confusing for Buddhists, because adding to all that confusion is the fact that many of us were raised to be nice people. I'm serious. Do you know what I mean? That we find safety in not being angry. There's some ways in which that it actually is problematic. That we say "Oh! If I'm nice I don't have to deal with my anger. Oh! Buddhism says not being angry is being on the way to awakening. Oh! How convenient!" In other words, anger is part of our shadow and the language of Buddhism seems to justify that.

I ordered his book just because I want to read the chapter on anger and you can only read the first few pages of it on Amazon. I should have it in a few days.

I'm curious as to what he recommendations on transforming will be. But I came to one resolution today: anger can be an appropriate, useful, and productive response if (but not only if) you maintain mindfulness and composure. I don't think I was at all wrong to be angry at the Christian(s). What I fault myself for is my lack of mindfulness and composure during the exchange. That could have changed it from shouting to something more meaningful.