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hey this is Leo for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to be talking about how to control anger part two controlling anger with holistic understanding it's been a few years since I shot the how to control anger part 1 episode you can go back and watch it but I've grown a lot in these intervening two years or so since I shot that and I have deeper insights about anger that I want to share with you that episode was very confrontational and provocative I wanted to actually provoke you so some people like that some people hated that about that episode here I'm going to take a more compassionate approach and I'm going to share a new facet of how to understand anger and what it's really about so first let's acknowledge that there are great degrees on the spectrum of anger everything from rage full-blown rage to just mild annoyance and everything that comes in between and the mild annoyance version of anger is actually probably the most significant to you uh if you're actually doing a lot of personal development work you probably don't have full-blown rage that often although maybe you do ah but what you have a lot more of is just these mild annoyances which are still very significant and you might not be aware of those because a lot of those are so subtle that it just takes a lot of mindfulness and awareness development already to start to notice how they affect how you feel and how you behave in your life there's also anger that is what I would call hardwired this is the kind of anger that comes from early childhood traumas like if you were abused or beaten or sexually molested this sort of stuff and you develop this deep bitterness inside of you now that's a slightly different issue I'm not focused on fixing that in you here that requires a deeper kind of work and that I might talk about in the future alright so here I'm talking about more normal Monday influences of anger so here's the perspective that I want to share with you about anger and now this is not going to be a complete description of anger this is not a comprehensive episode this is just one perspective on one way to deal with anger and to see where it comes from so the perspective is is that anger comes from a lack of holistic understanding that's the gist of it and my claim here believe it or not is that if you understand a situation or reality holistically and existentially that you can't get angry at it this might be situations out in the world or might be other people those are really the two things that you get angry at right situations and people maybe also yourself maybe you can angry at yourself so if you understand yourself holistically the world holistically and other people holistically then you won't get angry at them that's my claim now that might seem a little far-fetched and idealistic so we got to go in and actually talk about what I mean by this thing called holistic understanding and why it is the case that this is the solution to anger but before we get into that I'll give you a lot of examples of how this works exactly I just want to highlight that this is one of the reasons why I stress holism in my work a lot of the stuff I talked about tries to push you towards holism and also radical open-mindedness why is that because this is necessary right to be at peace in the world you have to understand how the world really works at deep levels that most people don't understand it at and then when I see people resistant to developing their understanding for example when I tell people to go read books or to go you know pursue some sort of hard work to actually develop the understanding they come up with all these excuses like oh well that's not important that's not important that's just seeking that's more seeking know that is true development that's true growth and that's important it's important that you develop this holistic understanding and this holistic understanding will not just come to you with enlightenment alone because there's a lot of other facets of the world you need to understand if you want to not be angry at it so okay let's talk about why holism is important so what's holism got to do with anger here's the gist of the fundamentals of how this works so first what you do is you create a partition with in reality this partition is called you this is a virtual partition you've created it now what you do is you convince yourself that this partition is the thing that must be defended it's the thing that's absolutely true and now what happens is that you're attached to defending this partition and as point of view that you have of reality but then inevitably because everyone else is doing the same thing they're also creating their own private partitions within reality your partition at some point gets encroached upon by another partition or by reality at large and what this leads to is you feeling injustice and a sense of violation because it feels like your little partition your little territory has been encroached upon so of course you feel violated and from that comes this sense of outrage and anger that you have you see and what this really is about is a failure to recognize the larger meta mechanism which is these partitions that are being created by yourself by other people and this insistence that your partition in your territory is somehow sacred this then leads to outrage because of course your partition is going to get violated because reality if you take a look at reality holistically right everyone's doing their own little thing but all of it is just a little aspect a little fragment of a larger um dance or recital right there's something larger going on here in reality than just your private little universe and a failure to understand these larger mechanisms of how these larger systems work I mean you're part of many large systems you're part of the social system you're part of the cultural system you might be part of a corporate corporate system you might be part of the species system with the entire species up to you might be part of the family system you know what family up - and how does that system work you might be part of your marriage system you might be part of a certain gender or a certain race and that's a system in a sense and so failure to understand these systems at holistic levels then leads to you getting angry because it feels like you're being violated see so bring to mind right now some of the stuff you typically get angry at maybe politics religion corporations terrorists other kinds of evil whatever that might be corruption abuse your family situation maybe you feel like something's not fair their relationships maybe you got some unfairness in your relationship that you're angry at other genders maybe you're you're angry at men or you're angry at women or other races maybe you're angry at some race because you feel like they're treating you unfairly they're treating your race unfairly or maybe you're angry at war you know why why do why do humans have war and and kill each other and all this violence and now you're angry at that well what I would suggest to you is the reason you're angry at any one of these things is because you're trying to look at the situation from your limited point of view from your small little partition and it feels like you're getting violated of course because reality is a much larger thing than just you and so you have to learn how to accommodate reality rather than reality accommodating itself - you see that would be a rather arrogant position to think that my little partition my little turf has to be sacred and never encroached upon by the larger hole see and failure to accept that is what leads to a lot of anger and what I see people doing is that they get stuck in their little point of view and they refuse to go outside their point of view to look at other perspectives that are out there and to develop a sort of metaphor a holistic understanding as I would call it and then because of that they remain petty small and bitter throughout their whole life and they don't really understand what's going on and also they're not able to be effective to be effective you need holistic thinking you need to see how all these systems interplay and work together because if you're bitter about corporations or about other genders or about other races or about how Wars work or you're bitter towards other countries or other nationalities or you're bitter at someone in a relationship or in your family you're not going to be resourceful enough to actually go in there and work the problem out you're just going to stew in your bitterness and that comes from clinging to your point of view so this idea of holism open-mindedness radical open-mindedness as I refer to it seeking understanding changing perspectives this is all extremely important if you want to be highly effective in the world and also if you want to be peace at peace in the world right how you going to be at peace when all these complex systems that you don't understand are encroaching upon your little turf it's not going to happen so how does understanding cure anger it works like this when you really understand a situation when you really understand reality existentially at very deep levels you stop shooting upon reality you stop shooting upon yourself you stop moralizing I've talked about this before this is very important to be angry you need to have certain rules and should statements that you make that you put up like standards that you establish like people shouldn't get killed and politicians shouldn't be corrupt and my family shouldn't fight with each other and my marriage should be smooth and peachy and women and men should treat each other better and there shouldn't be abuse and religion shouldn't exist and so all this should not and should be this way or that way right and when you create all these shoulds again what you're doing is you're you're insisting on your point of view and you're not seeing and not allowing reality to be exactly how it is when you see why reality functions has it does what that creates is just acceptance you accept and you realize like oh it's inevitable it actually couldn't be any other way than it is and then that produces peace see now again this might sound idealistic to you I know that if I was told this five years ago without a lot of the work that I've done a lot of the research that I've done it would have seemed like oh yeah I mean that sounds good on paper but what about when the rubber hits the road so let's take a look at some examples because I want to show you that this is more than just idealism or theory or philosophy right this is something that I intend for you to implement in your life in the way that I am and this really will give you pete's so let's take a look at some examples so let's say that you get mad or angry at corruption in general maybe you're disgusted by all the money and politics so corrupt these politicians are so corrupt and maybe at the dinner table you come home you know you watch some news and then you hear about some corrupt politicians and you come home to your dinner table and you start talking about how damn those politicians you know we voted for for the right politicians but they're still corrupt and so that pisses you off so in that situation what I'm telling you is that there's something larger that you're not understanding so your point of view is that I should be able to go vote for a politician and then he should be unimpeachable he should be perfect and spotless and just do the good work of the government and fight for my interests without getting corrupted by government you know special interests or corporate money ok that's your perspective that's your little turf that you've carved out for yourself right that's what you need that's your self agenda at work that's what you want and you treat it as though that's what the whole world won and what the whole universe was but that's not the case so in this case if you look deeper and you ask yourself what am i failing to understand here could I take a larger more holistic meta perspective you will discover that actually you can study why corruption exists what is corruption where does corruption come from isn't that interests as an interesting question to ponder why does corruption exist at all why do people become corrupt is it possible that there's corruption inside of me as well could it be that the same mechanisms that are running those corrupt politicians are the exam exact same psychological mechanisms that I find in myself but that I like to hide and deny could that be true and when you start to investigate all that and you realize what corruption really is and why it happens uh you can no longer be angry at it that's my claim and if you still insist on being angry at it what I would suggest to you is that you haven't developed a holistic enough understanding of it yet go study corruption more go really understand the root causes of it and why it exists and if you do that deeply enough at some point you will just find it impossible to be angry at corruption how about the example of lying maybe the thing that really rubs you the wrong way is when people lie to you it's like how could that person lie to me maybe like your kids have lied to you about taking drugs or something and then you get pissed off at them understandable but also realize that again you're looking at the situation from your point of view how about stepping into the other person's shoes and seeing it from their perspective how about trying to get a holistic understanding of the whole structure of lying and why lying exists why do people lie hmm that's an interesting question maybe contemplate that for a bit maybe study it maybe go read some books about it and maybe start to realize that hey you know I get angry at people lying but how much line do I do myself this lying mechanism is a large larger mechanism then we like to tell ourselves and these lies can be sneaky a lot of times I lied to myself and I don't even realize that I lied to myself until until years later same and so what happens that when you start to really understand how lying works and why people lie rather than defending your little perspective of course from your little perspective you want no one to ever lie to you of course that serves you of course you want that that's the easiest thing in the world to want what's really emotionally challenging is to say wait a minute let me open it up here and see the larger mechanism why is everybody lying why is that exists could lying serve a useful function in the world why is lying a part of reality is it because God is evil is it because of the devil or is it just a structural component is it part of something larger the larger design could I study that larger design and see why it really functions that way and my claim is that if you do that you will stop being angry with lying not just lying in general but lying specifically in the sense that your child might come to you and lie to you about something very important and while you might not like that lie I'm not saying you're going to like it but you will perhaps have such deep understanding of lying that you will understand why it was there and when you understand the why of it and when you stop shooting on the situation and saying no nobody should ever lie then what is there to be angry about try it same thing with the relationship or family problems maybe you have a problem with some relationship of yours intimate relationship maybe your boss is an [ __ ] or whatever doesn't treat you fairly and your angry at that well again I would challenge you to look at it deeper from beyond your own perspective and ask yourself what is relationship why do relationships work the way they work or if you feel a sense of injustice about your boss not treating you fairly because he promised you arrays but then didn't give it to you for example take a look into that what is the larger dynamic happening there what is business why does business work the way that it works why is there unfairness and injustice in business and if you really study that and you start to look at it and really investigate the existential roots of injustice of business of relationships you will stop being angered by those things same thing with war same thing with religious fanaticism same thing with rape you know a lot of times when I share these larger higher consciousness principles with you like here in this episode the principle is that holistic understanding basically nullifies anger to people who haven't been doing the work haven't been meditating haven't been doing consciousness work haven't been doing years of personal development that can be a difficult thing to swallow it sounds just like sort of like a new-age wishful positive-thinking concept right and then of course they come up with all sorts of radical examples to challenge me and they say stuff like well Leah what about rape I mean are you saying that rape is good is that what you're saying here is it really possible that by holistically understanding rape that one who is raped would stop being angry at it and actually that's exactly what happens with victims of rape so if someone is a victim of rape my heart goes out to you that's a terrible thing but also if you want to get over that situation psychologically what's going to have to happen first you're probably going to be really pissed off for many years then you're going to realize that being pissed off doesn't serve you and it doesn't really serve the person who victimized you either it doesn't do good for either of you so then what you kind of go through this kind of forgiveness process you start to forgive and as part of the forgiveness process then you start to understand and then what happens that you can actually develop compassion for the person who victimized you in the sense that you start to develop an understanding of why rape happens see when you think of rape just from your little point of view it feels like oh I've been violated and that was horrendous the worst crime possible okay yeah from your point of view that's exactly how it looks but look at it from the larger systems holistic point of view and you start to realize like hey you know that rapist probably had abusive parents and maybe if you bother to go talk to the rapist and I'm not saying that you should do this but I'm just saying that if you did in theory go talk to that rapist and really learn about his history and all the [ __ ] up [ __ ] that happened to him in his childhood that led him to being this rapist you would probably have sympathy for what he went through see and now you might say well Leo what if there was a rapist who didn't go through any bad stuff well nevertheless when you investigate right when you investigate why people do the things they do you ultimately learn that it comes from ignorance you see evil actions come from ignorance and when you understand that ignorant is such a deep and powerful force and so difficult to correct not only in others but in yourself when you really experience how much ignorance is within you and when you really try to go inside yourself and correct the ignorance and you fail over and over and over again for years and you really struggle through that ignorance that's when you'll understand why people do stupid and evil thing is because they also have that ignorance in them and many of them are so ignorant they don't even realize that their problem is ignorance yet might take them a decade to get to that point see and when you start to understand that it doesn't make the other person's evil actions correct but it takes the edge off them and it allows you to accept because you're now seeing the world from more than just your little point of view and that's exactly what's necessary to eliminate anger I'll give you one last example and this is a minor one right because I talk I talked about some big issues here you know rape war religious fanaticism lying and corruption you know these are big things to get angry about but I also want to point out to you that there are many little things that you get angry and annoyed on throughout your day that happened every single week with you so this could be stuff like someone steals your parking spot and that makes you angry minor thing you're right you're not in some full-blown rage over it hopefully just a little annoyed by it or maybe your upstairs neighbors making noises and you can't fall asleep on time and then you don't get into a total rage about it but it annoys you or maybe your spouse does something that annoys you like they're they pick their teeth or you know they scratch their nuts in public or something like that just a little thing that annoys you again apply what I'm talking about here this is a very general principle you can apply this principle to stuff like rape and war and terrorism or you can apply this principle to very minor things so the example I wanted to give you is just last summer I was experimenting with meditating outside usually I meditate indoors but I was meditating outside and I was really getting into it it was at 115 degrees here in Las Vegas in the summer but I was sitting under the tree in the shade on my lawn chair and just meditating for like 3 hours a day and I would do that and I was sitting there meditating and I was kind of in this higher conscious this zone state and then I hear a bird off in the distance and he's kind of squawking this annoying manner and I just I feel myself getting annoyed and a little bit angry at that just a little bit it's very subtle usually I wouldn't even notice that if I wasn't sitting there meditating for a few hours so I noticed it but then also what happens is that something clicks in me and I realize oh I am the bird there is no separation between me and bird or the sound that the bird made that literally is me and of course you can't be angry at that point and so it just becomes a non-issue now that right there that example right there might not even make sense to you what I even said here likely oh you and the bird how can you be a bird that sounds silly this sounds like you just you're just you know deluding yourself with fantasies and then and you're using this as some sort of technique to eliminate anger and then that's what you want me to do know um what I'm sharing with you here is actually a very advanced example you might need to do consciousness work for five years to get to the point where you can appreciate what this example is actually demonstrating right this example is a very advanced example because literally what's happening in this example is that the mind is understanding and becoming conscious of the arbitrariness of these partitions that are created and the most fundamental partition you create is between self and other or self in world and if you can ever erase that partition between self and other or self in world that is not just some positive thinking fantasy that goes way beyond belief you're at the very very existential level there and when you do that what pours forth from you is love and you have incredible amounts of acceptance for everything so when you can look into the eyes of a rapist and realize that that rapist is literally you if you can ever get your consciousness to that state um you will weep with tears of joy and love that's what will happen to you um that's how deep this stuff can go now you probably can't do that right now you can't fake it what I'm talking about here at this very existential level it has to be real you have to be fully conscious of it you can't fake it and I'm not saying that I'm perfect at this and that I can do it every single day I certainly can't and I certainly have my frustrations every day and I certainly haven't get angry at stuff sometimes a little bit um not it's like some full-blown rage but you know get annoyed by stuff all the time so um I'm just trying to show you what's possible this is your potential you can work towards this so if you've been an anger prone person for your whole life um that's just how it was but I want you to see that if you really commit yourself and you do this work and you stick with me and you learn all the different concepts and you go and apply it and you really want to you can reach this state where um [ __ ] that you thought would annoy you um indefinitely you can actually convert that and transmute that into love that's what's possible but for now just start with the basic stuff now let me answer a few objections one objection is Vallejo uh you know is an outrage justified and useful so it sounds like what you're doing here is you're kind of like taking my outrage away and then what am I going to do am I going to be as effective in the world this is a paradoxical point you will find that if you take your outrage away you will actually become more effective you don't really need it it might seem to you like being outraged then kind of creates certain motivation for you to go out there and solve a certain problem maybe you've experienced this where you get pissed off at something and then you really go and get to work and you solve the problem I've experienced that before um that certainly can happen anger can be motivating but there's something greater that can motivate you right there's different qualities of motivation and big part of personal development is purifying the quality of motivation that really fuels you so the people that think that outrage is somehow important and that if they lose it they're going to lose something valuable know what you'll find is you're going to gain something much better than that and also the new motivation that you do gain it's going to be more love based more positive base than negative base it's also going to feel a lot better it's not going to stress you out it's not going to cause health problems for you years down the road you know because angry people tend to be stressed all the time and then that leads to heart attacks and all sorts of physical health ailments another objection people might have is nobly oh I won't understanding lead to harboring of evil if I understand evil isn't there a danger that then I accept evil and then evil runs rampant through the world I mean if if nobody is out there in the world fighting evil that is in the world just going to be full of evil this is another very paradoxical point being angry added fighting evil and saying that evil should not be is actually the same mechanism that creates evil you are not going to stop evil by fighting evil the way you stop evil is by accepting it to death so will understanding lead to understanding of evil yes it will you will actually stop seeing evil as evil now for a lot of people this is threatening because they developed this whole identity about fighting evil from their point of view things look evil because they're so locked into their point of view if you take the biggest most holistic most existential perspective evil does not exist what you call evil is just another form of one unified reality doesn't happen to serve you which is why you feel it's evil but that's another matter that's how it looks from your point of view but your point of view is just one out of infinite number of points points of view in within reality right there's no reason to demand that your point of view be the the dominant one and if you live your life that way you will suffer a lot for it and the best way to stop evil is to actually accept it so much that you're not triggered by it and that you're at peace whether evil stuff is happening to you or not and when you can do that you can literally understand evil to death and then when you act from that place of understanding of evil to death um evil around you tends to melt away not always people can still do evil [ __ ] to you but it tends to melt away and you tend to develop this extraordinary capacity to radiate love and to radiate happiness in a way that people find it difficult to even do evil to you although they still can right it's not a not a foolproof method another objection might be only oh yeah sure you're talking about this now here standing here theoretically this all sounds good it's easy for you to say all this stuff like you know loving a rapist or something like that but what happens when you're put in this tough situation you know what happens if you lose your child or what happens when someone steals some money from you or whatever um will you actually be able to follow through on this I'm not claiming that I'm capable of following through on it at all times I'm putting this out there as an ideal as a potential for you to work towards that's what personal velvet is about is something I'm certainly working towards my own life and in the last year I've developed a lot of deeper understanding um and its really helped me with the little annoyances I don't get huge anger outrages but the little annoyances I do get and I find myself a lot more accepting a lot more loving of them now that I was just a year or two ago so this objection at all leo you know you just love a cushy life and it's so easy for you to just talk about this stuff um you know I've had some some evil [ __ ] happen to me and I'm like um a few years ago AB is a former business partner of mine stole 25 thousand dollars from me I have to go sue him in court in another country I actually published the episode about that a long time ago I won the court case I won the court case and still four years later I still don't have the money and I've had to you know work to accept all that that was challenging for me to do so you know some stuff sometimes I do experience like in justices that I perceive as in justices but also I understand that the injustice that I perceive is only valid from my little point of view within my partition and I understand why my partition gets encroached upon because it's part of a larger system where encroachment happens the deepest thing for you to realize in all this work is that reality is absolutely free that's what reality is is it's infinite degrees of freedom to really grasp that not just as an intellectual understanding but to really see it to experience it to to grasp it directly with your consciousness that's a huge breakthrough in this work and you start to realize that your only job in this world is really to make peace with reality and that a lot of what you've been doing your whole life is resisting reality and making peace with reality is a lot tougher than most people think because the truth is an acquired taste you think you like the truth you think you like reality no the real test of whether you can stomach truth and reality is when the [ __ ] hits the fan and something evil happens to you that's the real test because at that point yourself agenda and your ego get most activated and what you have to do is you have to have enough consciousness to let go of that and to realize that you're just one little speck of dust in the cosmos and that you have no right to outrage see and to do that this is not something you can fake this is something that you have to develop your way to it requires spiritual purification work it requires deep holistic understanding and that's something you can work towards to understand evil to death not as a belief but to actually to see it to penetrate it with your mind so that's the theory now here's the practice what do you do about all this how do you actually implement this well first I'll give you a very simple little technique that you can use so basically the next time that you're angry I want you to stop and to consider the other perspective the perspective that you're ignoring I want you to really understand that you have to be locked into a perspective to maintain anger and you have to not be seeing the big picture so here you're going to stop and you're going to really look at the big picture what's the big picture here that you haven't been seeing and the key question you want to ask yourself is what am i failing to understand no matter what it is so if you get cut off in traffic ask yourself what am i failing to understand there someone steals your parking spot what am i failing to understand there if someone steals some some money from you what am i failing to understand there if your partner cheats on you and your relationship what am i failing to understand there that requires you taking a lot of responsibility and then force yourself to dig deeper and understand the situation to such a deep degree that you finally hits acceptance that's what will happen and if you're telling yourself all you know I've dug into it but I'm still angry what I'm gonna tell you is that dig deeper because you haven't dug deeply enough dig until you hit acceptance and you might not succeed in every situation this is just something for you to practicing and just notice how you feel even one successful implementation of this will show you the results and maybe you'll develop a taste for acceptance and for peace rather than for being agitated all the time and pay attention to the minor stuff practicing this on the big stuff is going to be much harder and also you have to wait a long time maybe to get a big outrage going in your life but the little stuff you can find every single day you get annoyed by stuff all the time so find that and apply this technique to it right and start to practice holism seek holism in general in your life and holism now this is a deep topic that i will have to cover in the future I intend to cover pretty soon so I'll talk about what holism really means and go into a lot of depth about that which I can't do here but that's it for now so I'm done here please click the like button for me post your comments down below share this absolutely friend and lastly come check out actualized other world right here this is my website sign up to my free newsletter so you're on track every single week come check out the forum we have some cool discussions there people share a lot of great resources the forum can be useful for you it's also free check out my life purpose course my book list so the book list actually will be very useful for you if you want to truly develop holistic understanding of psychology yourself other people and reality at large so there you can get started I just want to point out that I do have more things to say about anger so we're not done here with this discussion there needs to be more discussion about anger because this is not the only explanation of how anger works like I said from the beginning this is just one perspective on anger so practice this start mastering this and then I will share more deeper insights in the future with you about anger which you can then dovetail with the stuff you learned and practiced here and then you will become imperturbable and your mind will be tranquil like a forest pond in the morning as many of the zen traditions like to talk about alright that's it I'm done here so sign up to the newsletter and stay tuned for more you