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Anger Workshop

Workshop 2 - July 16th, 2000

It is the same thing for anger. It is very clear, one receives it suddenly, not even from a person, from the atmosphere — it is there — and then all of a sudden it enters you and usually it gets hold of you from below and then rises up and pushes you, and so off you go.

A minute earlier you were not angry, you were quite self-possessed, you had no intention of losing your temper.

And this seizes you so strongly that you can’t resist — because you are not sufficiently conscious, you let it enter you, and it makes use of you — you … what you call “yourself”, that is to say, your body; for apparently (I say apparently) it is something separate from your neighbor’s body. But that is only an optical illusion, because in fact all the time there are what may be called particles, even physical particles, like a sort of radiation which comes out of the body and gets mixed with others; and because of this, when one is very sensitive, one can feels things at a distance.

- The Mother

CWM, Vol.8, p54-55.


I think you have always had an idea that to give expression to an impulse or a movement is the best way or even the only way to get rid of it. But that is a mistaken idea.

If you give expression to anger, you prolong or confirm the habit of the recurrence of anger; you do not diminish or get rid of the habit.

The very first step towards weakening the power of anger in the nature and afterwards getting rid it altogether is to refuse all expression to it in act or speech. Afterwards one can go with more likelihood of success to throw it out from the thought and feeling also.

And so with all other wrong movements. All these lower movements come from outside, from the universal lower Nature, or are suggested or thrown upon you by adverse forces — adverse to your spiritual progress.

Your method of taking them as your own spiritual progress. Your method of taking them as your own is again a wrong method; for by doing that you increase their power to recur and take hold of you. If you take them as your own, that gives them a kind of right to be there. If you feel them as not your own, then they have no right, and the will can develop more power to send them away.

What you must always have and feel as yours is this will, the power to refuse assent, to refuse admission to a wrong movement. Or if it comes in, the power to send it away, without expressing it.

- Sri Aurobindo

SABCL, Vol.24, p1410.


It is true that anger and strife are in the nature of the human vital and do not go easily; but what is important is to have the will to change, and the clear perception that these things must go. If that will and perception are there, then in the end they will go.

The most important help to it is, here also, for the psychic being to grow within — for that brings a a certain kindliness patience, charity towards all and one no longer regards everything from the point of view of one’s own ego and its pain and pleasure, likings and dislikings.

The second help is the growth of the inner peace which outward things cannot trouble. With the peace comes a calm wideness in which one perceives all as one self.

- Sri Aurobindo

SABCL, Vol.24, p1410.


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