Today's topic is anger. Anger is an important theme in A Course in Miracles. It really is
a key element in the ego thought system. The word appears throughout the Course and certainly
there are synonyms: hate, attack, rage, mild twinges of annoyance; all different ways of
expressing what anger is. And anger can be understood as being the projection of guilt.
Guilt really is self-anger, self-hate. We accuse ourselves of having sinned, ultimately
sinned against God, and then that guilt is so abhorrent to us that we have no recourse
in order to survive but to project it out, and we project guilt out. We say, I'm not
the guilty sinner; you are, and then we justify the projection by getting angry. So that the
Course would say that anger screeches that guilt is real, just as pain screeches to us
that sin is real. There's the section called, "The Witnesses to Sin," and pain is the witness
to sin. Something, someone outside of me has caused me pain and that person or entity or
microorganism is the sinner. So anger is always the projection of guilt, and there's no way
of avoiding that once we are in this world because only guilty people come into this
world. The Course tells us that the world's a delusional system of those made mad by guilt,
and that includes each and every one of us. If we believe we are here in a body we also
believe that we are guilty sinners and deserve to be punished. And again, we seek to avoid
that through the mechanism of projection and anger. And there are two times, two places
in the Course where Jesus tells us that anger is never justified, and this is often misunderstood
by students and it's taken to mean that we should not get angry, and that's not what
Jesus is telling us. Again, it's impossible not to get angry because
we come here, once again, as creatures of guilt. But by saying that anger is never justified
he's saying, "Don't attribute your feeling of anger and experience of anger to anything
that's external." People don't make you angry. You make yourself angry by making yourself
guilty by choosing the wrong teacher. Choosing the ego, choosing the ego thought system of
separation and specialness, differentiation is always a decision for guilt and therefore
is always a decision for anger. So anger is never justified because no matter what you
have done, no matter how hateful and vicious you may have been towards me or other people,
you are not responsible for the loss of peace that gives way to anger. In the section in
the teacher's manual, "What is the peace of God?" Jesus tells us that basically if you
wanted to avoid the peace of God, since we're also afraid of it, choose anger. Then anger
becomes like a shield or a veil that falls across our minds. So anger then is a defense.
All right, now part of the problem of all this is that psychologists have always taught
that anger is a basic human emotion; that normal people get angry, and that makes perfect
sense. Normal people do get angry in this world but normal people don't come into this
world. And it's interesting to note that one of the complaints that has always been raised
against Freud is that he does not have a theory of normality, which of course is true. He
did not think people were normal because he recognized the abnormality, or these hateful
thoughts, these insane thoughts that are in everyone's unconscious, and so therefore he
did not have a theory of normality because nobody here is normal. One could somehow try
through psychoanalysis to analyze away the guilt, or these feelings of self-hatred, these
big, bad, awful, dark, instinctual feelings and urges that we all have in our unconscious
according to Freud, but there's no way you could be free of them really. So no one here
is normal and what is helpful is to realize, again, that only frightened, guilt-driven,
sinful people come here; people who believe that they're sinful and guilty, and anger
then, again, once again, will always seem justified to us because we want to make other
people guilty of our own feeling of dis-ease and discomfort, whether we're talking on a
personal level or make other people or institutions or governments responsible for other people's
unhappiness and oppression. But the fact of the matter is, once again, is that since there
is nothing outside of us, because there is no world; this is a core element in the Course's
theory and one of the basic metaphysical foundations of the Course's teachings on forgiveness,
since there's nothing or no one outside of us then how could what is not outside of us
affect us? Anger always screams there is someone outside; someone who's evil, sinful, bad;
or a microorganism that is evil, sinful, and bad, virulent that could attack us; attack
our bodies. And that may be true on the level of the body but because there is no world
there is no body; there's only the dreaming mind that hallucinates a world that does not
exist. And so the core of that statement that, "Anger is never justified," is the belief
that no one and nothing has the power to take away the love and the peace of God from us.
Only our decision-making mind can make that choice. So if any anger would be justified
it should be aimed at ourselves, but certainly not that we be angry but that we recognize
our mistake so that we could choose again. Choose innocence instead of guilt and choose
love instead of hate.