Dealing with rage

Dechen Choekhor
Four-armed Mahakala (महाकाल)

Dealing with rage |
Saturday – November 22, 2025

Anger is an emotion and much like other emotions something is usually required to evoke anger: usually this takes place in the form of a moral and sometimes material unjustified imposition on the world and as a defensive mechanism anger is evoked. But when you allow yourself to enter into a state of rage you lose grip of yourself and reality and you become completely controlled by your feelings of anger and rage and those feelings seek to destroy the world (Kali). Yes, during our times of the Kali Yuga I understand that the feeling of anger and rage can be nearby, but this is only the case as long as you live in the material domain. Consider the consequences to your life and to the lives of others if you allow your anger to get the better of you: in a split second you can both destroy your own life and that of another human being. Let's say that a man has evoked, perhaps even rightfully, a strong sense of injustice within you and you decide to lash out against this man and you hit him and the man falls to the ground and hits his head and he is now dead. What would you do in this situation? Would you take responsibility, perhaps a little bit too late? Or would you perhaps again allow your animal senses to get the better of you: would you simply run away and allow for your cowardice nature to win? No, no proper and real man would deal in situations like this: a real man would only use violence when absolutely forced to by circumstances outside his own control and ability, such as in the situation with self-defense, but self-defense has very little to do with you lashing out in a fit of anger and rage. Yes, some people will want to provoke you; these people's entire existence seems to evoke anger and rage in you, but that's only because you've allowed them to do this. Why should other men be allowed to control your instincts? Why should you allow yourself to act like an animal? Again, what proper man would allow himself to act like a barbarian? No real man would ever act like this, but you see the serpent would like you to act like an animal, driven by the populist hysteria of the moment, and so it does make perfect sense within the ever shrinking confines of the material domain for you to just straight up kill another man who "provoked you". But let's deal with that term, provoked: what does it really mean to be provoked? When you are provoked as yourself this: how is it that I am allowing another person, who I know seeks to make me upset, to control me and my emotional life in this manner? No, you need to take control over your senses and that should begin by shunning the world out and looking within yourself, because the world is always and will always be filled with noise that is meant to control your mind. The serpent seeks to manipulate and to control you through your mind, and every time you allow anger to win, every time you allow rage to destroy some corner of the world, you also allow the serpent to control you. See, the best way to treat and deal with aggression and anger is to not allow it to control you: to deal with rage you need to get yourself and your own nature under control, and this does not mean oppression, repression, and suppression. Yes, it is very important and legitimate to feel strongly as a human being, but there's a profound difference between feeling and acting on feeling, and really one could say that this difference encapsulates the fundamental border between a boy and a man: all real men know that they under no circumstances can allow their feelings to dictate to them what their next step, their next action should be. By not controlling your feelings you are essentially giving up autonomy over your life and your destiny and this action is by definition evil and it reduces you to the level of the beast. It would make perfect sense for the lowest beast of them all, the obedient soldier ant in the form of modern man, to allow his life to be controlled by the whims of forces outside his own domain, but this simply cannot be the case for you if you are a man that is seeking to walk towards the light.

    What can be done to deal with rage? Well, I think the best and the most prudent option is to depart from the material domain, but then again this post is about men who live in the world. I think many people will give you advice such as going to a certain location where you can allow yourself to feel and act out on that rage, but this action is really not much better than to just allow your emotions to explode. No, I believe that you should control anger and rage and really any emotion by redirecting it towards something more productive, and this would make sense especially in the material domain: you can allow anger to motivate you. I need to add that I am not a fan of motivation and that has to do with a couple of things, but my biggest reasons why I oppose or really dislike the notion of motivation is because motivation is seldom stable and more often than not you are actually not being redirected towards something more productive by acting on motivation; you are simply high on life but only for a very short and fleeting moment and then you will crash. When you crash all of those emotions that are adjacent to anger such as sadness and depression will fall over you and in the end your life will be ruled and predictably so by a sort of high-on-life-crash bust cycle and this will also be used against you by the serpent and in the end I think that you will have accomplished nothing. No, you should refrain from motivation. I believe in steady as she goes: in other words I believe in consistency. Without moral consistency there will be no real justification for your life.

    When you allow your anger to get the better of you in a very short moment, when you explode, you may not only destroy someone else's life, but you may destroy your own life in the process. The whole point of this scheme, the material order, is indeed to control you, but if you want to break free you need to stop allowing your emotions to control your actions because your destiny is not necessarily shaped by the serpent.

    Lastly, are there any situations in which anger is acceptable? No, but there are situations in which violence is acceptable, but just because a situation requires violence that does not mean that the necessary violence should come about as a function of anger and emotion; violence should come about only as a necessity, something that I have covered in the past, and only a man who possess skillful means should ever allow himself to use violence. Anger is for the most part a destructive force and indeed sometimes such a force is necessary and good and even a sign of the creator's love, the creator's love in the form of his divinely inspired vengeance, vengeance against the perpetuation of evil and of evil intent. Think about anger this way: when you destroy the world, or some corner thereof, you destroy your own world too, and after all someone's going to have to clean up all that mess. Do you really want to spend your limited time on Earth cleaning up a mess?

Reginald Drax – November 22, 2025.