INTRODUCTION

THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS

         1. All life is suffering.
          2. Suffering is caused by desire or attachment to certain outcomes or results.
          3. Suffering can be ended by giving up attachment.
          4. The Buddhist method for learning how to give up attachment.

          I can't stand clichés; some of them make me so angry. If you have never suffered or you don't care that billions of men, women and children on our planet are suffering or you're one of those people who flaunt your saintliness by "being positive" you'll neither understand nor care about my anger. But all of you have something to learn that you don't already know.
         Anger is healthy, suffering is not.
         Through a lifetime of investigation, I have come to understand the symbolic meaning of the above `Truths'; however, I want to be explicit. Exactly what kind of `attachment' are the writers of this cliché talking about?
          Water? Food? Shelter? Health? Safety? A Rolls Royce?
          Religious evangelism, persecution, martyrdom and deprivation have been used for thousands of years as an excuse for political and economic inequity and injustice. But my reaction of anger to the above `Truths' is similar to the first time I heard another cliché expressed in a class given by a Sociology Professor. He told us the French existentialists had declared that "all people have a choice." At the time, I had no choice at all; I was completely trapped and his words made me furious! But I never forgot them. The reason I didn't forget them was because they made me angry.
           It wasn't the cliché that taught me, it was my response of anger to the utter stupidity of that statement which propelled me to discover why I was trapped and what to do about it. My anger challenged the beliefs that were implanted in my brain when I was a child and showed me how to change the circumstances that had trapped me. My anger gave me a choice.
           There's way too much we don't understand about life and human behavior. there are experts all over the world writing, teaching and proselytizing, but nothing changes. The human species continues to run roughshod over people, animals and the land caring nothing about the devastation left in its wake. We can try to blame one country, one culture, one religion or one race for this savagery but anyone who has studied or traveled knows that every race, every religion and every country had prejudice, corruption and most have ravaged their own environment. To point fingers is naive and hypocritical.
           We could also blame just the men for this aggressive carnage, but mothers collude in the cultural training of their sons who become selfish, narcissistic brutes and teach their daughters to silently prostitute themselves for security or add to the mayhem by clawing at each other.
           While our collective brains are now arrogant in delusional self-satisfaction regarding our superiority in information, technology and power, we are myopically overlooking the obvious. the most important thing on each is mutual respect and quality of life.

 Chapter I

          Anger is different than hate. Anger is the supreme heat of passion, of caring too deeply, while hate is emptiness, a lack of compassion, a vacuum of spiritual love ... of not belonging. Hate is disconnection from humanity with an empty heart.

        The catastrophic flooding of the Mississippi River in the United States in 1993 is an apt analogy to anger and human behavior. The Mississippi has an energy of its own and could not be contained within man's fortifications just because we willed it so. In fact, believing the energy could be contained indefinitely is exactly what caused the catastrophe. If we had worked with the needs of the people as equal to the needs of the river, the disaster never would have happened.
        The belief that we're superior beings with superior minds breeds a contempt and arrogance that leads us resolutely down the path to tragedy, both socially and individually. The desire to put on blinders, damming and suppressing anything that bothers us, is the greatest fallacy of the human condition.
        Human beings repress anger the same way we tried to control the Mississippi river; by bottling up our emotions inside ourselves as though it could remain there indefinitely. Like water, emotions are energy; we cannot subdue stored anger any more than we could master the Mississippi. When too controlled and confined, the energy eventually explodes, forcing the individual into sudden, extreme acts of violence toward anyone within range.
        This theory also may partially explain cultural aberrations such as genocide, fanaticism and individual acts of the mentally ill; however, this book does not pretend to explain sociopathic or psychopathic behavior.
        Anger is power. It's the same kind of power as the Mississippi, only it's contained within human beings instead of within soil. Cultures can dam, and damn the energy of anger in a variety of ways, but it will eventually gather enough strength to sweep everything out of its path unless acknowledged and respected.
        Collective anger causes mass destruction. Individual anger causes immeasurable pain and suffering. Just like the Mississippi, individual and collective anger cannot be walled in, dammed up, denied, imprisoned, medicated and controlled. It will explode when it gets too full, destroying everything in its path. Anger is a major force that must be dealt with, it cannot continue to be suppressed or just managed.
        In its initial stage, anger is an instinct for self-preservation. All animals have it, and human beings are animals. The difference is that wild animals express their power while human beings cannot; humans have no riverbeds for guidelines and, besides, we're not allowed.
        Most cultures view life as a dominating, competitive, hierarchical grab for power. Most people choose to believe that cooperation, caring, love, generosity and justice are weakness and refer to "those wimps and whiners" as though people who prefer sharing and caring for others are losers.
        In addition, the methodological, behavioral and scientific approach to human behavior has convinced most of us that human beings are controllable like rats in a laboratory; forcing us to suppress our negative emotions into denial and invisibility. Because we want to control life, it must be so.
        With this mindset, engineers proceeded to wall up the Mississippi as though it was just another irritation in our path toward domination. They had no concept of cooperation, no respect for nature, no care for the river itself. We have something to learn from the American Indian.
        Our social dysfunction has caused anger to become the most misunderstood, misused and maligned of all the human emotions. And yet, anger is our most important ally for self-defense. It's the trigger for justice, for equality, for assertiveness and for personal safety and autonomy. It is, next to love, the most important advocate that we have as social beings. Yet, most human beings are taught from birth to suppress this most basic of instincts as an unsociable and unacceptable act of confrontation.
        Human anger is nothing more than a demand for justice. The problem is that the injustice is usually damned inconvenient; it's a lot easier to deny, ignore and suppress the anger than it is to do the work necessary for resolution. Parental, economic, educational and social systems of hierarchical and dictatorial behavior create injustice.
        Supposedly we learn from history, but I don't think so. History has taught us over and over, that no one culture, no one religion, no one ideology, no one perspective, no one race, no group of people and no one person can predominate over all the others. The obvious answer is to learn how to cooperate with differences instead of forcing our ways or beliefs onto others.
         The solution is to eliminate neglect, abuse and inequality at home, in institutions, in schools, in businesses, in government; to realize that every human being on this planet is equal in value and deserves to be treated with respect and to live a decent, honorable life. We must realize that any display of anger has a belief, mistaken or not, that an injustice has taken place. All that is necessary is to dialogue and not to deny; and to learn the difference between an immediate and a past injustice so we don't dump the past on the innocent. We must learn to live cooperatively with the planet, with ourselves and with each other.
        This book clearly separates infant, child and adult behavior. One cannot compare a child's behavior from an adult perspective; we've been too corrupted. We must view the infant as the animal that it is; and only then can we understand what it's trying to communicate. Similarly, we cannot interpret child/adult interactions in the same way that we interpret adult/adult behavior. The child has no power. Yes, they push, torment and fight to get what they want, but that's their job. They're little animals learning how to live, balance and survive in the world.