David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this blog post with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2021 by David Spangler.
My father was a deeply loving man. He was not a drinker, but otherwise he was a bit like Jimmy Stewart’s character, Elwood P. Dowd, in the movie, Harvey, open and considerate with everyone he met. Forming friendships came naturally to him. But he had a secret. He had a berserker temper.
As a young man, in the heat of that temper, he had come close on a couple occasions to killing another person. This loss of control when angry so frightened him that he clamped down on this part of himself. In all the years of my childhood, I never saw him angry with another person. In fact, though never explicitly stated, the expression of anger was avoided in our household. One simply did not get angry or express that anger if one did.
For me, the consequence was that while growing up, I never learned how to deal with anger, either in myself or in another. Unlike my father, I do not have a temper, but like anyone, I can certainly become angry. My challenge was that I did not have tools with which to deal with it. Feeling anger in another was always a bit frightening for me. Being sensitive to subtle energies, I could feel and sometimes see that anger as spikes of hurtful energy emanating from individuals, much like quills from a porcupine. Feeling anger in myself, I was concerned with what I might be radiating as subtle forces that could harm another.
It was my sensitivity to anger as a form of subtle energy that enabled me to learn how to deal with it, but first I had to accept anger into my life as an ally. I needed to recognize the ways in which it could be constructive as well as the obvious ways it can be destructive and harmful. I needed to learn to trust myself to be able to handle anger constructively (something, I think, my father was never fully able to do where his own anger was concerned). But I also had to learn to trust anger itself as a form of energy that was as sacred as any other form of subtle energy. Whether it was a positive or negative thing, constructive or destructive, depended on how we held and used it.
Fire has often been used as a metaphor for anger. I believe it’s a good one. We know fire out of control can destroy. We also know that fire held and channeled gives us light, warmth, cooks our food, and in fundamental ways, made civilization possible. We have built our human world on the energy of fire and what it has allowed us to do.
We are living in an angry time. As we awaken more and more to the imbalances, the injustices, the incompetence and even stupidity that are damaging our world and our societies—many of them deeply rooted in the traumas and habits of our histories—anger is a natural result. It can be frightening, especially as the suddenness and swiftness with which anger can turn into berserker and destructive rage is presented to us daily through the news. And it is frightening in the way we now have tools through the Internet and social media to anonymously, and thus without personal consequence or accountability, let our anger loose in ways that pollute, corrode, and destroy our ability to work together. This is happening in a time when our survival depends on that very ability, when communication and cooperation are vital for human continuance and evolution.
Anger is hard to hold. If we suppress it within ourselves, it can cause harm to our bodies and our psyche. If we just let it explode, it can cause harm to the world and people around us. Sometimes, the stress we feel makes it seem impossible to hold it. It feels good to let it explode, to rage against the world, to destroy because we have forgotten that we can also create.
I don’t have a full answer for this. Like