Sadhguru: A whole lot of people are asking me about how to control or manage anger. Anger means you went out of control. “How to manage out-of-control me?” This is a crazy question.
Sadhguru offers a unique perspective on handling negative emotions like anger and resentment, recalling his own moment of enlightenment and his plans for sharing his blissfulness with the whole world.
Sadhguru: A whole lot of people are asking me about how to control or manage anger. Anger means you went out of control. “How to manage out-of-control me?” This is a crazy question.
Religious people are angry because someone is insulting their God, and of course they believe their anger is endorsed by their God or gods. People who think they love someone are always angry out of their concern for that someone. Parents are angry with their children because children are not rising up in glory. Teachers are angry with children because all the stuff that they learned in 35 years, children are not able to learn in 12 months.
Everyone seems to be angry with someone. You are actually not angry with someone – you are using someone as an excuse for you anger. You can call it anger, misery, or anxiety – essentially, your intelligence has turned against you. It is just like your hand going out of control and smashing your face.
If your own hand starts smashing you up, everyone understands that you have gone off your rocker. But if you do similar things with your own thoughts and emotions, you call it anger, misery, resentment, and hatred. These are all poisons that you drink and expect someone else to die. Fortunately, it does not happen like that. If you drink poison, you die. Creation is very fair.
So, what can you do? You need not do anything about anger. You need to do something about yourself. When you get really angry, most of the time, you suffer more than your victim. Why are you causing suffering to yourself? It is happening because your thoughts and emotions are not taking instructions from you. They are doing their own thing.
In other words, you are an accidental existence. When you are an accidental existence, anger, misery, anxiety, and madness are quite normal. In fact, the English expression that people use when they get angry is, “I am mad at you.” You can be mad at anything, but the important thing is, you are just mad.
Most people think they are angry because of someone in their workplace, on the street, or at home. It is not really so. Even if you stay alone, you will get angry with something – something that exists or something that does not exist; something that you have, or because you do not have something.
Your anger is not about someone else. It is about you being out of control. The greatest faculties that you have are memory, imagination, and your ability to emote, which is very important. If you had to grasp and understand everything in the world the way it is, it would take a million years. If you wanted to completely understand a leaf or an ant, it would take a lifetime. But emotion is another dimension of intelligence with which you can know life simply by inclusion.
You can include someone and know them – you do not have to dissect them. By dissection, you will not know anything for real; you will know mundane things, but that is not real knowing. Emotion is another dimension of intelligence through which you can know life very intimately, intensely, and, above all, in a very pleasant and wonderful way. This emotion, which should have been sweet and wonderful, which should have flown out of you in the form of love and ecstasy, unfortunately has gotten a little rotten within you.
Rottenness of your emotion shows as anger, anxiety, and resentment. This rot has set in because you are trying to influence your emotion with the limited understanding of your intellect. Your intellect, however great you think it is, is a very limited instrument. If you look at the vastness of creation and the competence of your intellect, you will see it is too small to know anything.
This happened to me. I was a very smart young man, or so I thought, and this was further endorsed by friends, social circles, and even my teachers. Although I never paid attention to academic aspects, even my teachers thought I was very smart. I was a cocky young man – doing very well, being successful. Life was happening the way I wanted, and I had no complaints.
One day, I went up a hill, sat there, and something within me exploded. Suddenly, I knew life in a completely different way – a totally new dimension of life. I was drenched in blissfulness. For the first time in my life, I felt like an utter idiot because everything I had assumed I had known became total trash. I started knowing and experiencing life like never before. The only thing I am doing since then is to somehow rub this experience off on as many people as possible.
I realized that if I simply sit there without messing with my thought or emotion, I am blissful, and I can stretch my ability to experience life in a limitless way. So, I sat down and planned. On that day, the world’s population was 5.6 billion people. I thought in two and a half years’ time, I can make every human being blissful and ecstatic.
Here I am, 39 years later, having worked 7 days of the week, 365 days of the years. People say we have touched over a billion people right now, but the world population has grown to almost 8 billion people. I know I will die a failure, but a blissful failure. May you be blissful. That is the greatest success in your life.
