On fear and anger

We treat fear and anger as though they were different emotions, and I suppose they are to a certain extent.  They certainly feel different inside of us, and we often react differently externally as well.  When we’re afraid, we may try to sink into the background, cower, cry, and so on.  When we’re angry, we may scream and stomp and make others afraid.  But notice how many of these external reactions cross over from fear to anger and back again depending on the situation.  And when we look at the function of these emotions, we can see that they both exist for exactly the same reason: to resist what is in favor of what was.

Things change.  That is the one fundamental law of the universe.  Upon that truth, everything else is built: everything is relative and changing except for the fact that everything is relative and changing!  Change is the only constant.  The universe bangs into and winks out of existence.  Our lives are here and then they’re gone.  Stars explode into being and implode into the aggressive nothingness of black holes.  Expand and contract, live and die, spirit and emptiness, gain and loss.  The whole universe is one big inhalation and exhalation, again and again.  Here and gone, here and gone.

We know this, I believe, on an instinctive level.  But we spend our lives fearing change, fearing death, getting angry when a loved one leaves (through volition or through passing away).  Fear and anger are what we do to resist change, to try to make things as they were.  We are exerting our will upon the situation: if I can just be angry enough, we tell ourselves subconsciously, the universe will see and make things better.  If I am afraid enough and don’t go out my door, maybe the change won’t be true.  What if?  What if?  What if the world changes?  Fear and anger are, on a fundamental level, the mind’s rejection of the present moment.  These emotions allow us to disconnect ourselves from reality, to oppose reality.  This is not, however, a fight we can win.

Reality may be unacceptable, but it is our job to accept it.  We don’t have to be sheep led to the slaughter, of course.  When we accept (as Shunryu Suzuki puts it) “things as it is,” then we can make powerful changes.  But how can we expect to effectively affect something we haven’t even accepted as real due to our anger and fear?  We cannot act powerfully when we hold ourselves in a trembling rage or a cowering slump.

As martial artists, we train ourselves to accept what is.  It may be unacceptable for someone to punch us, but we try to accept it and make powerful choices from there.  We engage in things that frighten us on purpose: pain, being hit by others, hitting others, working with weapons, and so on.  As we do more and more training, these fears pass.  We begin to see that they were illusions of the mind, a natural (though not helpful) resistance to the fact that my life takes a drastic change the moment someone attacks me.  I already have to resist my attacker: am I going to waste my time resisting my own mind as well?

So we let go of our fear and anger, and we pick them back up again, and we let go again.  That is the law of change too.  Just remember, you’re going to let go of your fear and anger someday, when you die, no matter how much you love them.  Mightn’t it be better to let go of them now than wait until then?  Imagine, if you set those emotions down, the things that you could pick up instead.