Anger is one letter away from Danger

How to control anger? Although the senses require a certain amount of satisfaction, unless regulated they become like wild horses, forcing one to obey their whims. Craving the objects of their satisfaction, the senses take control of the mind and intelligence, leading to frustration and anger when their impossible demands go unmet.From this anger, delusion arises, and from delusion, bewilderment of memory. When memory is bewildered, human intelligence is lost, leaving one in a hell of irrational behavior. As fever is a symptom of some disease in the body, anger is a symptom of ongoing material hankerings. Just as treating fever alone will not cure the disease, treating anger without understanding it to be a symptom of lust will not extinguish the unwanted behavior. To conquer anger, we must first ask how we shall conquer lust

Lord Buddha said that retaining anger is like ‘holding a live coal intending to throw it at someone else.
How can we deal with anger? Thomas Jef­ferson suggests, “When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, count hundred.” Con­sciously delaying action is useful in checking angry outbursts.

Humorous but works : When you are angry , pay a handsome amount to a good cause. In this way you would never get angry

When things go wrong, it is natural to feel angry. Yet just because it is natural doesn’t make it desirable. Of course, neither is it desirable to be passive amidst injustices; we need to be assertive and do what we can to set the situation right. But our response should alleviate the problem, not aggravate it.

And anger almost always aggravates the problem. When we become angry, we frequently lose control of ourselves. Or more precisely anger takes control of us using a provocative situation as a front.

And then anger makes us do things that we would never do normally. Things that may break others’ hearts. Things that may become lifelong wounds in our relationships. Things that we may regret for years.

In addition to all these long-term fallouts, anger extracts a heavy cost in the short-term too. After giving us a fleeting feeling of control and power, anger abandons us, embarrassingly and distressingly ensnared in a predicament worse than the original problem.

In fact, anger sometimes does worse than worsening the existing problem. Anger may create an entirely new problem – a problem that is bigger than the original problem. The original problem may might have been an unpleasant situation, but our angry response that starts off as a justified expression of displeasure (“I can’t tolerate such uncleanliness”) soon transmogrifies into a heart-breaking character attack (“You are a lousy fool, a shameless rogue, a wretched curse in my life”).

No wonder the Bhagavad-Gita (16.21) cautions that anger is one of the gates to hell – it propels us into hellish situations even in this world. Therefore the next verse (16.22) urges us to meticulously avoid the insidious influence of anger and thereby become free to act in our enlightened best interests.

The man who has escaped these three gates of hell, O son of Kunti, performs acts conducive to self-realization and thus gradually attains the supreme destination.