March 4, 1997, Ocean Beach, San Francisco

Anger, not quite so easy to get back under control. Think heroin. Think crack. ??? Addiction? Maybe not the best analogy, just something you want to get rid of or stop and find it not so easy. The difference is why.

But as it is possible to kick an addiction, I think it's possible to tame anger. I think anger is a conditioned response, and it can be re-conditioned with effort, mindfulness, and introspection. And commitment.

It's fascinating seeing what anger really is when you're trying to get rid of it. It becomes something totally different from what you thought it was. You receive anger-stimulus, you get angry, but instead of reacting or responding, you watch it. Try locating it in your body – is it in your heart, your head, your arms, your eyeballs. What is it? Is it moving around? Is it you?

You're looking at the anger and you're looking in the mirror. But that's not you. You're wondering who the hell that is trying to get away with something. It's a raw version of you, a conditioned, habitualized version of you. That's as far as I've gotten. Stalement. External situation not made any worse, internal situation not fully defused.

As an intellectual exercise, I consider that my parents are a result of my karma. It would be petty to think about what might have happened in the past for me to end up with this karma, because the possibilities are literally endless.

Everything is a karmic manifestation, meaning that everything is a result of numerous causes and conditions coming to fruition. And to turn it around, every moment is a karma creating event to be borne out in the future when all causes and conditions are ripe.

So the parents I have are the result of some past karma, and I don't know what it is, but if I think of it that way, I can take some personal responsibility for my present situation. I can think that the connection with them isn't completely random and cosmically unfair. That allows me to try to look at it more deeply, instead of just being angry.

At the same time, I can think about how I deal with this manifested karma, and how I deal with it is creating karma for the future. I can be angry and perpetuate the conditioning of my mind to be angry, and 50 years from now, I can still have this unresolved anger. Karma manifested to karma creation to karma manifestation.

Or I can re-condition my mind to not be angry by really investigating it and taking it apart and that creates different karma. Karma manifested in a situation to make me angry, instead of creating new karma by getting angry, creating new karma that is patient and compassionate, training my mind to be more peaceful, manifesting karmically later by being a person who doesn't get uncontrollably angry.

You can go through all of this and remove all mention of karma and re-word it in psychological terms. After all, as I've mentioned, the buddhadharma doesn't exist, and that's one of the best things about it.