Working with Anger and Aversion

Tonight in the talk I'd like to pick up on one of the threads that already Christina and John have mentioned, and that is anger and aversion. I want to talk about working, working skilfully, with the qualities, the forces of anger and aversion.

It's pretty obvious, I think, if we just turn on the news on the TV, if we just open a newspaper, it's pretty clear the power and the prevalence of the forces of anger, of hatred, of hostility, in our world. It's pretty clear. And we see it in all kinds of scenarios, in all kinds of situations. It's not even just a human thing -- you can see animals do this too. It's just sometimes it seems as if the human species has a particular talent for it.

And we can see, it's very clear, again, we can see the havoc wreaked, the devastation that that force, that energy, creates in the world, causes in the world. All kinds of situations -- personal, in one's own being, in between two people, in between countries, etc. There are even situations or contexts where that whole force of anger is actually legitimized -- some wars (a lot of wars, in fact), or terrorists, etc., countries going to war. And it's a context in which the force of anger, for some of the participants in that war, can actually be legitimized.

Now, this is a huge, huge topic, and I just want to -- it's really more than one talk can chew, but I want to just pick on a few aspects and strands. It's also very complex. I want to respect that complexity and the richness of it as a subject for our investigation. It's very complex. It's very rich. But one thing is clear. One thing is absolutely crystal clear, or rather, should be crystal clear to us. When we use the word 'anger,' actually it involves many different facets and aspects of what that one word means, as many single words do. One thing to be clear about is that the desire to hurt, the desire to hurt or the desire that another being hurts, that is never helpful. That's never helpful.

The Buddha has this very famous analogy, that that kind of anger, manifesting as a desire to hurt, it's like picking up a burning coal to throw at another person or another being. We pick it up, and we hurl it at them in anger. And in so doing, we get burnt, and we hurt. That desire to hurt, as a thread that runs [through anger], when that runs through anger -- never helpful. We really, really need to be clear about that, deep down, and to see it as suffering, to be very clear that this is suffering. It causes suffering; it is suffering.

But as I said, anger is complex. There's a real complexity there. So right away, I want to address that a little bit. I'll come back to it later on. To say "All anger is bad," I'm not saying -- we are not saying -- that there is a condoning of harmful acts, that if someone does something to us or to others that is harmful, that anger is spiritually bad, therefore that's okay. That's not making that equation at all. But there's a difference in separating out the act, the act that is harmful, and anger at the being and wanting to harm another being in retaliation. Acknowledging the suffering of anger is also not never saying no. That's a lot of negatives! [laughs] It's not the case that to acknowledge the suffering of anger as a force of suffering, it's not saying that we never set boundaries and we never change a situation, we never say, "Stop. That's enough," we never stand up in our truth and are strong in that. It's absolutely not saying that.

It's interesting. Given all this complexity, I don't think the question of anger is a simple question or an easy question for us as human beings. I think it's actually a very difficult question to go into, to live a life really exploring that. And I am actually a little wary when too simple answers are given: "All anger is bad. It's never ...", or "You always want to express it," or something like that. It's also interesting, too, though, and I've noticed this for myself, that the kind of people that are interested in this kind of thing (spiritually oriented kind of people, contemplative-type people) -- not always; I know many people involved in this kind of work who are very easy to express anger and have no problem just letting it all out -- but generally, often, there's a little bit of a fear of that energy of anger, and it's quite a loaded issue for contemplative-type people.

But rather than coming to a sort of quick and easy answer about anger, can it be something that we keep investigating in life -- in an ongoing way, keep that exploration alive? We need to really understand it. We really, really need to understand this energy, this force. And that needs a lot of investigation, a lot of deep willingness to investigate. We actually need to be interested, really interested, in the whole movement of the whole process, and the whole movement of mind there. And to recognize: it's very human. It's a very human thing. So right now, right in this moment, right now, all over the world right now, in different situations, in different political situations, religious environments, geographical situations, socio-economic strata, etc., there are people with anger, people in a bad mood. That's going on right now -- people, beings, burning with that, hurting with that, closing off with that, shutting down, shutting people out, contracting, hurting themselves and hurting others. Right now as we speak, this is going on. That state of mind and the pain of that is going on.

When tonight I'm going to explore this, anger and aversion, there's a real spectrum here. There's a very large spectrum from murderous rage on the one hand to just a subtle kind of irritability with. Sometimes it's just something like a little, thin film over our experience. And it can manifest through a huge range, and it can manifest in different forms. It can manifest certainly through our acts, through our speech, in our thought, in our intentions. It can manifest as -- it must have been a word that came out of psychotherapy; it's a very insightful concept -- passive aggression.

Many of you will be familiar with this. This is very interesting -- when the person is actually denying that there's any aggression: "There's no ... I'm fine!", and yet they're acting it out, and they're acting out of that place. They're acting out the aggression in very subtle ways. Usually it's expressed as a kind of non-doing. So there's something that they're not doing as the expression of anger. So they may be ignoring. They're ignoring the person they're angry with. They're just blanking them out. Or there's a kind of stubbornness, or a kind of sullenness. They just kind of go into a sullen, unreachable place, or even reachable but not really connecting. Sometimes when that happens, it's only partly conscious. The person even doing it is not totally aware that it's going on. And as an energy in the world, it can wield an enormous amount of power. Can have a lot of power wielded through passive aggression. If you've been in meetings or trying to dialogue with someone, it can actually stall the whole process. And because it's so subtle, it can be very hard to even pinpoint that it's going on and identify what a person is doing that it's going on. But the person on the receiving end or the people on the receiving end actually begin to feel just crazy and can't quite figure out why. Some human beings have perfected this to an art -- it's a very refined kind of art form.

Aversion expresses itself even more subtly. Mind states like boredom, fear, restlessness (John was talking this morning), depression. Aversion is a factor of depression. It's getting a bit more subtle now, but it's woven in there. Sadness is an interesting one. When does sadness have aversion in it? That's very, very interesting. And even more subtly, it's not even manifested as a whole emotion, but it's just this subtle movement, aversion -- wanting to get rid of something, wanting to destroy, wanting to reject, rejecting some aspect of experience, turning away from -- that's coming as a reactivity, as a sort of knee-jerk response. It's not wise and it's not considered. It's not a wise turning away from. It's not a wise dismantling of something or letting go of something. It's actually a reactivity. And it can be to anything. It can be to sounds -- sound of a lawnmower, or the sound of the rooks in the trees, the birds, the sound of our neighbour shuffling and changing posture, the pain in our knee, an emotion that we reject. It can be absolutely anything.

So it's very human, and there's suffering involved. Any bad mood, any state of unhappiness involves aversion. Any time there's a bad mood, any state of unhappiness, there's aversion woven in there as a principal factor that's keeping it going. I read this lovely analogy by a Tibetan geshe, a Tibetan teacher. He said, "Imagine living in an apartment with three roommates. You've moved into this apartment with three roommates. But these three roommates, one of them is consistently hard and menacing. One of them is very friendly but completely disloyal. And the third one just spurs the other two on, eggs them on. [laughter] How can you find any peace or trust living in a situation like that? But that's exactly like what it is to live with these, what's called the three kilesas, the three root defilements or root torments of the heart. Hard and menacing is aversion, seems friendly but actually pretty disloyal is greed, and delusion or ignorance is the root one of the three -- it just spurs everything on.

The Buddha had a word for someone who's completely awakened, completely enlightened: arahant. Literally, it means 'foe destroyer,' someone who's destroyed their enemies. And the enemies that they've destroyed are aversion and greed and delusion. We're very clear that this quality of aversion is an enemy, and we're moving towards freedom from it. But it's very human, and to really see that. Judging of it is not really helpful, and we have to see the humanity of it.

One metaphor or model is, you could kind of see consciousness as throwing up these seeds of aversion and greed and delusion almost constantly -- in fact, constantly throwing them up. And the question is not that they come up; the question for us is, as practitioners, what are we doing with these seeds? What are we doing with the seed of aversion and the seed of greed? Are we planting them and tending them very nicely, and the next thing we know, we've got a whole forest of oak trees? What are we doing? The seeds are going to come up until we're arahants and Buddhas. What are we doing with the seeds?

Now, anger is complex, and as I said, I'm quite wary of too easy answers. There are a lot of theories about this: "Oh, you need to release it. You always need to release it. Otherwise you'll bottle it up and you'll get cancer." [laughter] Or whatever it is. Lots of theories around this. But for the Buddha, one of his real genius aspects was his way of simplifying what needed to be simplified. So the overarching kind of question that's behind all practice, overreaching all practice, is: what is it that leads to suffering, and what is it that leads to freedom from that suffering? That's a consistent background and foreground question in our practice, and that's a question that he kept coming back to -- not theories about the self, or "You need to get rid of the self or dissolve it," or theories about releasing past stores of anger or stores of this or that. Just this question, and he kept coming back to that. Suffering for ourselves, and suffering for others. That was his sort of rule of thumb for practice.

So how can we work with this, with these energies, anger and aversion, to actually relieve some of the suffering? Well, there's a lot that we can notice, and a lot that we can actually use the reflective mind to help with, actually reflect on and question. So one piece is to reflect on the consequences of anger. Even, you know, with a partner or a spouse, and there's a split-up or there's an argument, it's possible that something comes out of the mouth, something comes out in a communication, written or whatever, email or whatever, that actually fractures the relationship. A heartfelt "sorry" can go a long, long way in this world, but it's possible that in the heat of anger, in the sort of blindness of anger, something comes out, and it fractures the relationship in a way that it can't actually be mended, it can't be repaired. I know from my past, from years ago, having said things to people, communicated things to people, and I thought I was being honest, and I thought I was being truthful. I did still say "sorry," and I really meant it, but still, the feeling is that something was broken that I wasn't quite able to repair. So really contemplating the consequences of this.

Anger makes us unattractive. The Buddha was quite fond of pointing this out, that no matter -- not a very good example here, but -- no matter how well one is dressed ... [laughter] Adorned in whatever, Gucci and all the rest of it, what you're wearing, necklaces, jewellery, da-da-da, hairdos, etc., when you're angry, no one finds you attractive. It's not an attractive energy to people. Not only that, but people feel uncomfortable. If you walk into a room with an angry person, you can actually feel it as an almost electromagnetic vibration in the air. It's not a comfortable energy to be around.

So we can, particularly when we've been hurt by someone, there can be this very normal, almost primal, we could say, desire for revenge. And this is something that we really, really need to question. It's very normal. It's very human. But to really realize, and use the reflective mind: how would it benefit me, how would it benefit me in any way, that this person suffers? They've hurt me. I suffered. What benefit would it be that they suffer? They broke up with me, they cheated on me, they did it in an unfair ... What benefit would it be that they suffered? They abused me. Even if it feels like they deserve that for what I went through, that would be justice -- the image of justice is the scales. It's equal: "Well, this for that." But what would I really get from them getting their just desert?

Sometimes when we feel hurt there's a real feeling of powerlessness, that we feel really powerless in that. Very normal and very human feeling. It's very, very easy -- and this really is primal; very interesting how primal this is -- when we feel threatened and we feel unable to do anything in regard to that threat, whether it's physical, emotional, whatever, and there's a powerlessness, how easily that moves into rage that wants the other person to feel equally powerless and squeeze them under the thumb. That's a very interesting feeling, but to let oneself kind of feel into that, and again, asking this question, and feeling one's own powerlessness, and then imagining that the other person feels powerless. If you really just sit with that and dwell with it, you'll actually see that there's not a happiness in that. There's not a happiness in the other person feeling powerless. There's a kind of unhappiness there. There's a kind of sadness that runs through it.

There was a survey done in I think it was America, in Texas, I think, where they still have the death penalty, as many of you will know. I think Texas is the state with the highest number of death penalty victims. And they did a survey of families of murdered people who pressed for the death penalty and even witnessed the death penalty on the criminal. They followed them up, and they asked them how they felt about that. And no one said it was satisfying. No one said that they actually felt any better for it.

Anger builds on itself. There's something in it that loops on itself, it builds on itself. It has that as a characteristic of it. It snowballs and feeds on itself. We really need to be clear about this. About twenty years ago, I was in my early twenties, living in America, in Boston. And I began working with a psychotherapist. I was very into the process and working quite hard with it. She said to me, "There are some issues with anger, Rob. It would be good for you to go to the local gym and get one of those big punchbags and release some of this anger." I'd never done anything like that before, but I went along, got some boxing gloves, and pummelled this punchbag, which was bigger than I was almost. And would just pummel it and really get into it. And as I punched it, and sort of focused on the anger a little bit to get it going, what I noticed was as I punched, I got more angry. Laying into it harder -- it was really tiring, actually, physically tiring. I thought, "Ah, now I'm really contacting! Now I'm really getting in touch with the deep stuff!"

This went on, and I was very diligent as a client, until I had -- many days of doing this -- broken through the boxing gloves and blood coming from my knuckles, etc. Still doing it, feeling enormous da-da-da. Until something -- a little slow on the uptake, but [laughter] -- something clicked, and I realized: this process is fuelling itself. It's not that I'm getting in touch with anything deeper. There's something here that's actually cycling on itself and building on itself.

There's a beautiful collection of verses from the Buddha. It's called the Dhammapada. There are a few near the beginning that are very famous that I just want to read. He's talking about anger and aversion, and what we need to understand about it. He says:

'He insulted me.

He hit me.

He beat me.

He robbed me.'

For those who brood on this,

hostility (hatred, anger) is not stilled.

'He insulted me,

hit me,

beat me,

robbed me.'

For those who don't brood on this,

hostility is stilled.

And he goes on:

Hatred never ceases through hatred.

Hatred only ceases through non-hatred. [Some translations say through love.]

This is an eternal truth.

It's interesting. We talk a lot about impermanence, and here's "an eternal truth." Nothing changes that.

So today we introduce the mettā, and I'm actually not going to talk about that because I think John is planning to talk about that tomorrow night. But obviously huge as an antidote for healing anger and aversion. But there are three things that I want to draw out a little bit, if I've got time, as ways that we can work. The first is actually empathy, as something that moves us towards instead of away from.

I recently found this description. Some of you will remember, in 1984 the IRA planted a bomb in a hotel in Brighton that had the Tory conference going on. Some of you will remember that, some not. And a number of politicians and others were killed. One of the daughters of one of the politicians, Jo Berry, daughter of Anthony Berry, was a young girl when that happened. And later she decided to go and meet with the bomb maker, whose name was Pat Magee -- he had been released in the Good Friday Agreement, had been given several life sentences and then was released -- and just kind of explore the possibilities there.

She said:

An inner shift is required to hear the story of the enemy. For me the question is always about whether I can let go of my need to blame, and open my heart enough to hear [Patrick's] story and understand his motivations.^[1]

So she's talking about something very extreme, but this happens in smaller ways in our lives, the same dynamics.

The truth is that sometimes I can and sometimes I can't. It's a journey and it's a choice [very insightful], which means it's not all sorted [out] and put away in a box.

It felt as if a part of me died in that bomb. I was totally out of my depth but somehow I held on to a small hope that something positive would come out of the trauma.

She goes on to talk a little bit about forgiveness, but then she says:

Now I don't talk about forgiveness. To say "I forgive you" is almost condescending -- it locks you into an 'us and them' scenario keeping me right and you wrong. That attitude won't change anything. But I can experience empathy, and in that moment there is no judgement. Sometimes when I've met with [Patrick], I've had such a clear understanding of his life that there's nothing to forgive.

I wanted to meet [Patrick] to put a face to the enemy, and see him as a real human being. At our first meeting I was terrified, but I wanted to acknowledge the courage it had taken him to meet me. We talked with an extraordinary intensity. I shared a lot about my father, while [Patrick] told me some of his story.

She goes on a little, but at the end, she says:

Perhaps more than anything [I'm beginning to realize] that no matter which side of the conflict you're on, had we all lived each other's lives, we could all have done what the other did.

There's another way that we can feed this empathy as an antidote to the anger, and the Buddha talks about it in the next verse from this Dhammapada. He says:

Unlike those who don't realize

that we're here [in life] on the verge

of perishing,

those who do,

their quarrels are stilled.

Just being aware how short our time is, being aware of the imminence of death, puts the whole thing in a different context. In another jail, I think also in Texas, on death row in this jail, they were beginning to notice that the death row prisoners were extremely peaceful and placid. It was a very peaceful part of the prison. And they went there. Some psychologists went there and started interviewing people. And they were very clear: "It's simple. We know we're going to die. That changes everything for us." This is something we can reflect on as well.

For some reason, I find it a little funny: there's a sutta of the Buddha, a discourse of the Buddha, and he talks about the reasons, the common reasons that people are angry. He does this funny thing where he sort of constructs this grid thing. And he says, "Why do people get angry? What are the reasons people get angry?" And he says, "Well, 'In the past,' we think, 'this person harmed me,' or 'In the past, they harmed those I loved,' or 'someone I loved.' Or 'In the past, they were [this is interesting] helpful to those I don't like.'" [laughter]

So in the past, there are three reasons. Then he said, "Or 'In the present, they were harmful to me, they were harmful to those I love, or they helped people I don't like.'" And the same for the future. It's like this kind of grid. Then he says, in each kind of instance -- he does this kind of thing sometimes; it's quite interesting -- in each instance he says what to do.

"One should reflect," he said -- again, still using the reflective mind -- "'Well, what should I expect? It's the way of the world.'"^[2] So he's talking about equanimity. Something coming into the view that feeds -- opens up, better way of putting it -- opens up a sense of equanimity. Now, that doesn't mean cynicism: "It's the way of the world. People are all terrible, etc. People are scoundrels." It's not cold and it's not indifferent. It's not disconnected. But it's a way of just seeing: this is what we do to each other. This is how it goes. This is the way of the world. Something that moves the seeing into a bigger picture -- this is so, so important, seeing a bigger picture. It's very easy to focus on one person who did something or is doing something or will do something we don't like, and focus on that one person, and that focus feeds the anger. Something about spreading open, opening up the picture, and seeing, "It's not just one person. It's the way of the world."

As resident teacher here, I get -- I don't want to say 'dragged along' [laughter] -- I get invited to different kinds of meetings, and different kinds of meetings about the running of the house and teaching policy and blabbity-blah and all that stuff. And it's interesting. Obviously being very invested in Gaia House, and loving it very much, and being invested in teaching, I have opinions and I care about it. And in these meetings, different opinions and views get expressed, of course. One can notice -- I was noticing this the other day -- it's very easy to, you just see before the meeting, a little bit of contraction start to happen. You're suspicious, or you have a sense of what someone wants to say -- you know, because in the email they sent you, you kind of read between the lines. [laughter] And you can feel something contracting there. But to reflect: this is the way of the world. Of course people have different opinions. Of course not everyone's going to agree with the way I think it should be run. Of course, of course, of course. And there's something about that, the power of that kind of reflection -- very powerful.

Sometimes we're in a situation, in a conflict with someone else, and again, it's very easy to see them or blame ourselves for getting angry. Sometimes really helpful to step back again, see a bigger picture, and almost see it in a massive historical context. Human beings have been arguing with each other, disagreeing, hurting each other, being hurt, wounded, trying to patch it up, doing all that for millennia, before recorded history. They were doing it before even speech evolved, probably. Just to see it in that context and see the two of you kind of from above, and see the humanity of the situation. Instead of being over-focused on them or over-focused on my story, just see the humanity of that. There's almost a way that you can just see, "Oh, this is just human. This is just human," and that can soften things.

Now, there's empathy, there's equanimity. I was going to throw a third thing in about not-self, this emptiness of the self. But I think I will leave that and come back to that in another talk, because obviously self and anger, there cannot be anger without a self, and self is very much a part of that. But I'll come back to that later in the retreat probably.

So this attitude of questioning, that we can really -- I think Christina was saying in one talk -- the mindfulness, there's a kind of passive mindfulness, and there's a probing mindfulness that's alive with questioning, and that's really important. Sometimes you can actually verbally have a question, keep questioning anger: "Why am I angry at this?" And if someone says, "Because they did something," you say, "Well, why are you angry that they did da-da-da-da-da?" "Because da-da-da-da-da." "Well, why are you angry because da-da-da-da-da?" [laughter] And you just keep going with this. Don't just take whatever they say. Keep probing with the questioning. Eventually -- there are other strands, too, but eventually one gets down to something that's kind of silly, like "I expect all people to be well-behaved all the time," or "I expect all people to respect da-da-da-da," or "I expect that everyone does this." It's not realistic. It's a little bit silly, actually. But this is what we do. This is what we do as human beings. The thing is not to buy the answers, the quick answers that the mind gives. There's a probing of questioning, a kind of -- I was going to say Jack Kornfield has this lovely book called A Path with Heart, and sometimes the path needs another quality: cojones. Do you know what cojones means? [laughter] A path with balls. Excuse my language. Sometimes there's got to be a kind of -- it's not just about being passive. It's actually about pushing, pushing up against what the mind does. Excuse my language. [laughter]

Okay, so there's this kind of questioning, probing, and reflecting. Mindfulness -- and this is absolutely huge. This is really, really huge. So investigating the process, but what can we do with mindfulness, and this quality of attentiveness and open attentiveness? When there's anger, oftentimes -- in fact, almost always -- there's a story spinning. There's a story spinning with it. And we get, consciousness gets sucked and the self gets sucked into the story and looping around in the vortex of the story. Not saying that the story is not important and doesn't have facets and aspects that are not important -- not saying that at all. But when we're working with mindfulness, the first sort of station of mindfulness is actually the body. And the mind will get wrapped up in the story, will get sucked into that vortex. Just noticing that, bringing the mindfulness back down to inhabit the body. What does that anger feel like? It's unpleasant -- heat, pressure in the body. Where is it in the body? Really allowing, allowing and holding the physical manifestations of the sensations of anger in the body, or aversion in the body. So the mindfulness is almost like that -- it's just open and allowing and holding, just allowing them to be there. They can come and go and ebb and flow, and they can just be there.

If we can do that -- and this is a practice -- and keep coming back from the story, and get sucked into the story, and just keep coming back and holding, if we can do that, not always, but oftentimes what happens is we can, first of all, develop the capacity to hold those kind of difficult emotions. But also sometimes anger is resting on quieter emotions, more subtle emotions -- emotions like hurt, like sadness, like frustration, even, powerlessness. And it's almost like being with what's going on physically, the other, quieter strands can begin to reveal themselves, and we can begin to sense into what's going on.

And we begin to get a sense of what's feeding the anger. Sometimes it's something like fear. Sometimes it's not even fear of the person that we're angry with -- it's fear of maybe what a friend or colleague or peers might think of us if we don't act in a certain way, and that's somehow feeding the anger. But particularly emotions like hurt and sadness are actually quieter, more subtle. They need a bit of gentle allowing to show themselves, to reveal themselves.

Now, it's very, very common as meditators to assume that everything gets done here. So I'm feeling angry, I'm having a difficulty with someone, "I need to let go." And of course, there's huge potential for me to let go. But sometimes, when we're with the quieter feelings and the strands that come up, we actually see -- sometimes it's not just about me letting go; something needs to be communicated. Or that's a question: is there something that's not just about me letting go, and actually something that needs to be communicated, either from me to the other person, or from them, that I need them to communicate something to me? That's a very real question. We need to keep that door open. It's not all about what goes on here. Sometimes, of course, communication isn't possible -- a person is dead, not around, not open to it, etc. But not to assume that it's all here.

One of the things [about] being mindful of the actual emotion of anger, and letting those quieter strands of hurt and sadness [reveal themselves], is that that is much more helpful to express. It's much easier for someone to hear your hurt and your sadness than your anger. And if we can be with the emotion of anger, and just let it settle, let it settle a little bit, let it speak to us, we can be more sure. And this, I think, is really, really important, that if we decide to go to communicate, that the desire to hurt has been drained out of the experience as much as possible, so that when we're going to communicate, we're not going to be one better, to put them down, to hurt, etc. We're going to communicate. That desire to hurt has drained out of the experience.

And then, if we're going to communicate, another huge question: do I actually know how to do that? Now, that's a whole -- at least another talk; a whole retreat, even. Huge skill, huge art: communicating what is difficult. Massive. It's quite a rare skill in our world, and even actually in spiritual circles it's quite rare.

Okay. There's the mindfulness, but it doesn't stop at just the bare emotion. We need to see something about anger, and we need to see that anger (and aversion, now -- the subtler aspects of anger), we need to see that aversion colours perception. It colours perception. We have this phrase in English, "seeing red." "I was so angry, I was seeing red." We're actually aware that it's changing our perception of another person, of a situation, of ourselves, of whatever, of life.

Usually, we see this afterwards, and we say, "Oh, yeah, I was just seeing it so much from that space of anger." We really need to admit this is going on. This is really just a level of, I don't know, psychological maturity -- just really admitting that we were seeing a situation through the lens of anger. In a way, nothing gets done if there's not that level of truthfulness there.

Today we introduced the loving-kindness practice. Sometimes, in fact it's quite common for a person to come to me or another teacher and say, "This loving-kindness, it just seems so phony. It seems like you're kind of, I don't know, painting everything pink." [laughter] "It's like you just imagine nice things, and wish these nice thoughts that you don't really feel. It's a bit like imagining pink angels descending, little cherubs everywhere." [laughter] "It's all a bit false and phony." Both aversion and loving-kindness are what we call 'fabricated.' They're fabricated perceptions. That's true.

When there's aversion, we're actually seeing in a certain way. It's colouring our perception. And when there's loving-kindness, we're also colouring our perception. It's interesting, though, how we tend to believe the aversion more, how we're very suspicious of the loving-kindness but we just buy right into the aversion commonly. Can we reverse that? Actually, when you really do a lot of loving-kindness practice, what you realize (hopefully) is that yes, they're both fabricated, both the loving-kindness and the aversion. But actually, the loving-kindness is less fabricated. It's less built up. At first it seems like you have to huff and puff and do everything to get this mettā going, but you see: mettā is dependent on letting go, and it's the aversion that needs the huffing and puffing -- it's more fabricated.

So a question that's fundamental to practice is: what suffering am I building unnecessarily? This is an absolutely fundamental question to practice. What suffering am I building unnecessarily? And is it possible to just not build it? You could say to dismantle it, but just not to build it.

We can see: aversion and greed can feed each other. It's interesting. When we're in a situation that we don't feel happy with and there's aversion there, how easily something or someone else (in a partnership or relationship or whatever), someone else -- we remember past lovers: "Ah, they were just ..." whatever. Or in the future, we see someone else, or something else. Or in a job that we don't like: "When I quit this lousy job ..." Something else gets to look fantastic. The aversion is building the greed. And conversely, greed can build aversion. When we're attached to something, and that feels threatened, it goes to aversion. The question is, or one of the questions is, are we believing, or rather, how much are we believing aversion and greed? So aversion is a wily trickster. It's a wily trickster, and we need to realize this. In the middle of an aversive mind state, sometimes, if there's enough conviction in knowing that aversion is not telling us the truth of things, you just hold that in mind, aware of the tricks, that it's playing some tricks, if we believe it less, the whole thing can soften. The whole thing can just soften.

Wanting can bring aversion. Sometimes even the best intention wanting: "I want to concentrate," and there's a bit too much tightness in the effort, and our neighbour just -- I don't know -- inhales a little loudly, and there's aversion there. It's triggered by the wanting. Now, that doesn't mean throw out all effort. We don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. But to realize the relationship here.

So how is aversion, anger, an aversive mind state, how is all of this built? Well, a lot of it is built through perceptions and views, and this we really need to explore. I was reading about a prison guard in the apartheid regime in South Africa. He was saying this years afterwards, saying how he was taught to regard the Black Africans as no better than animals. He was actually taught that as a prison worker, and even before, when he was a kid. You see the same in Nazi Germany, with Nazis towards the Jews. There's a kind of dehumanization going on. Something is coming into the perception on which the anger and aversion feeds.

This happens in very small ways. When we're in an argument with someone or in a little conflict, what happens to our perception of their intentions? How easily we go to assuming they intended to hurt, their intentions were bad. It's not that we can get rid of those assumptions, necessarily, but just to doubt them a little bit. Sitting here and it's too cold, "It shouldn't be this way." There's a view, "It shouldn't be this way," and the aversion feeds on that. Or you have some knee pain. And the thought, "I bet no one else has a back pain like I do. I bet no one else." At the level of thought, it's building the aversion. We need to see that connection. How is thought building aversion and the unhappiness that comes from that?

So there's the thought level, and there's another level, which is almost more subtle than the thought. When there's a bad mood, when there's that kind of unhappiness of aversion and anger, there is always aversion to the mood itself. When there's aversion, there's always aversion to the mood itself. It's very interesting that it's so closely knit. We have anger, and there's the pressure of it and the heat of it. Now, sometimes that can be kind of seductive, especially if we feel we can just ... But there's also aversion to those physical sensations of pressure and heat and the discomfort of that. Because there's aversion to that, we want to get rid of that, it goes very quickly into wanting to explode, wanting to lash out. It's coming from the aversion to the aversion. The mind wants to move in impulsivity. It's almost as if we can't contain the anger, and it wants release.

So there are different ways to work with this. One is the mettā, which we've talked about and John will talk about tomorrow as well. But it's skilful, too, to work with the breath in a way that soothes that. More we work on this retreat with other strategies involved with mindfulness. So giving those sensations, sensations of pressure, the aversion itself, giving it lots of space. We've been talking about opening up space. On this retreat, we've been talking about it quite a bit. But really opening it up. It's the opposite movement. We contract with aversion, and just opening up the space again, letting the aversion and the discomfort of it being there, be there. Maybe even going so far as to actually welcome, as genuinely, as fully as possible -- we can experiment with this -- really emphasize a kind of welcoming of the actual feeling of the aversion, the actual feeling of the mind state itself, really opening consciousness up to welcome that. What would that do?

It's possible as meditators that we develop the skill of learning to recognize when there's aversion there, and learning to soften it. So we can just recognize, there's a tone that comes into the body when there's aversion there. We can learn to recognize and become sensitive to it, and learn to relax it and soften it. It's something that can develop, slowly, gradually. We can develop that. Sometimes just the simple awareness that there's aversion there, just this subtle pushing away, just aware. Sometimes that awareness is enough to relax it, to allow it to die a little bit.

As our practice develops, we move not just from a mindfulness of objects, but from a mindfulness of our relation to objects as well. So, "I don't like this. I wish this would go away." Actually being really interested with the mindfulness in that relationship. So we give attention and care of attention to the actual relationship that we have with things.

In a way, it's a bit like swimming -- we kind of learn in the shallow end. So things like knee pain, things like sounds, little irritations, we can learn a lot there that is mirrored on a larger scale. Now, unfortunately life isn't so kind as to give us everything in a nice order, a sort of gradation from easy to difficult, but we can really take advantage of the little moments of aversion, little moments of irritability, and what we learn there holds for the big scenarios.

Last point I want to make. I just want to say a little bit about it, but it ends up being really, really crucial in our kind of Dharma exploration. If we really give attention and interest to aversion over time, and noticing this movement, noticing what it does, we will see, as I said earlier, that it colours perception. There's no question about that. Aversion colours perception. But actually, more than that: aversion builds our experience. So we can be sitting here with an ache in the back, or an ache in the knee, or a sound that bothers us, and when there's aversion to it, it actually makes that thing more prominent, more solid, more substantial, larger looming in consciousness. Aversion is a builder of experience. There's something really, really crucial about that, and about really being clear about that and understanding it.

Going back to that analogy from the Tibetan teacher, that delusion is the thing that spurs greed and aversion on: part of the problem there is that we don't understand this about aversion. So we think when we're reacting to something with aversion that we're reacting to something that is real and that's just how it is -- it exists independently like that. But actually, we need to see this many, many, many times, that it doesn't. The aversion is a feeder and a builder of that experience. It's making it larger. What happens to our experience of something unpleasant when we let go of the aversion, and then let go of even more subtle aversion, and keep letting go of aversion more and more subtly? What actually happens to the experience? It's an extremely interesting question.

So not understanding that things don't exist independently of the way that we're looking at them, that's, in a way, the root delusion, what the Buddha calls the root delusion. That's what's egging greed and aversion on, and causing all this mayhem and suffering in our lives: not understanding that.

There's a lot here, clearly. There's a lot here, and really, just to reiterate something I said earlier: aversion is not to be judged. It doesn't disappear -- actually, in its more subtle forms, it doesn't disappear until we're completely awakened, until we're an arahant or a Buddha. Can we be interested in it, really, really interested in aversion? It's going to come up from time to time, and maybe come up a lot. In its subtle aspects, it comes up really a lot. If we really understand aversion, if we really are willing to be interested in it, to explore it, to take it on, if we really understand aversion, how it is built, and understand its effects on the world of our perception, if we really understand how aversion is built and what effects it has on our world of perception, the Buddha said, to quote him exactly, "There is nothing further to be comprehended." That's it. To understand that in its totality, that's the end of the path. It's one movement towards the end of the path. Nothing left to understand. To be really interested in this. It's very difficult energy for us as human beings, but it's a doorway. It's a doorway of opportunity to freedom. The more we understand it, the more freedom.

Should we just sit for a couple of minutes together quietly?