In an October 2020 conversation with KCRW, a broadcasting service of Santa Monica College, Pico Iyer observes that “we gain nothing by cursing the people we dislike” and “exchanging resentments.”
Indeed, as Pravrajika Vrajaprana, a nun of the Ramakrishna Order, points out (in the same conversation), by doing this “we are simply making ourselves more unhappy” because “when we hate, when we get angry….the person who we’re directing that to, doesn’t really experience it the way we do.” Pravrajika Vrajaprana also points out that our anger and consequent unhappiness “becomes a self perpetuating cycle. And then other people, they’re affected by it….emotions are actually as contagious as the flu.”
In “The Art of Philosophizing: and Other Essays”, Bertrand Russell makes the intriguing statement that “It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won’t go.”
Marshall Rosenberg explains, in “Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life” that “what other people do is never the cause of how we feel. The cause of anger lies in our thinking — in thoughts of blame and judgment.”
Peace 😊
