How do we stay calm in a raging world? Most of us think that we need the world around us to change in order for us to change. We think that if the people in our life were more responsive to us or if politicians were thinking about things in the right way or doing the things we wanted we wouldn't have to be so angry. But from the perspective of Buddhism, staying calm comes from healing our own anger. This is because as long as we're meeting the world's rage with our own rage, more rage is guaranteed.
We experience the world through the lens of our own habitual patterns: our cognitive mental patterns, our emotional patterns, and the legacy of all our interactions with other people. If we have intense habit patterns of anger, we become angry that much more easily. Even though we might appear happy or cheerful, it's like the anger that we have within us all of the time is simmering right below the surface. It can be ignited in an instant—say, if we come across something that we'd rather avoid or that we find frustrating or that is the opposite of how we want things to be.
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