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Comment by dasudasu | Hacker News Reader

Monks of various religious dispositions, or even just secular meditation adepts, seem to disprove this easily.

A friend of mine went to a Zen Buddhist monastery for a month to start practicing to deal with his anger. After the month he told his teacher the reason why he came - to dissipate his anger - and his teacher told him that he had nothing to teach him because the fact that he was feeling his anger was the practice of mindfulness. The teacher told him he’d be better off leaving the monastery and working on the object of his anger (human-induced climate destabilization).

I think you’re appealing to the boiled down and stripped away “mindfulness” movement in the west that focuses on creating what I call “Vipassana Zombies” - people who can feel their sensations just enough to recognize and ignore them. A lot of Buddhist teachings are about empowerment and action, and they’ve been grossly misunderstood.

I am choosing to imagine that the monk called your friend to take up the battle of climate justice and revolutionary struggle, which is indeed a very mindful way to utilize anger over injustice.

"You will find peace in action. Join an eco-guerilla cell. Use your rage to guide your contribution to the cause - it is a valid emotion driven by a need for change. Long live the revolution! For Victory! For Justice! For Peace!"

haha not far off. He believes that we should be doing carbon capture by rebuilding our top soil, as that's the most sustainable way of pulling it down while continuing to feed people. He's starting a school to teach regenerative techniques to farmers.

I see it exactly opposite. A Buddhist monk would learn to experience, feel, observe, and detach from their anger, not suppress it or shame it. This is more in line what what I think we need to do.

The more you resist the anger the more it will persist.

There are neurological studies that show that anger cycles can escalate and become amplified with practice. That's not what we want.

Acknowledge your anger, yes. Then acknowledge your control, not only over how you express it, but even over whether you feel angry or not. It is possible to develop the skill to stop being angry. This is far more important than going with the flow.

It's often a bitter pill to swallow, because it means the people that act out of anger, or are always angry, are ultimately responsible for how they feel. It is not someone else's fault you feel angry.

“the skill to stop being angry”

Often that amounts to changing the people or circumstances in one’s life. That’s the point of therapy. A good therapist wouldn’t help a sexually abused child stay in a bad situation and just learn to suppress emotion. Well maybe a cbt therapist would. But a good therapist would try to help catalyze a change in the situation causing the trauma.

The neurological studies to which you refer point to the neurological phenomenon, but you’re mapping that to a single possibility for the psychological process that is coupled with the physical phenomenon, namely, that anger monotonically amplifies over time when reinforced, perhaps to some asymptotic steady state that’s greater than a normative baseline

An equally valid narrative is that, especially in our society where most people have repressed anger, once anger is tapped into, there’s an overwhelm of backlogged emotion that is also released. Anger as an emotion is energetically expensive for a biological system, and it doesn’t make any sense that it would continue to be reinforced indefinitely.

It's a lot more nuanced than that. You can't just "control your anger". You can layer a controlling part of your mind on top of the anger to try to swat it down every time it surfaces, but this is a temporary solution. Especially when the anger is rooted deeply in things like trauma or shame.

The path forward is to understand the anger with compassion, and the trauma or painful emotions below it, or the boundaries that are being crossed. Rather than just trying to force yourself not to feel it.

It's not that different from telling a depressed person that they should just think positively to cure themselves.

Monks are doing it on easy mode. They have nothing to anger them, zero triggers. It’s the whole point of hermeticism. Remove all sources of stress. Desire nothing. Of course they aren’t angry, they have nothing; nothing to feel angry about.

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