Stuart Wilde Q&A: Anger and Fear

Controlling Anger

Q: How can I control anger? I meditate often and am generally a peaceful person, but sometimes anger rises and I become overwhelmed by it.

A: Just don't be angry. You might say, "Well, that's easy enough to say, Stuart; I'm really pissed off." Don't be. What is anger? It's only a game. Something has come along and contradicted your ego — that's all that has happened. Anger comes from loss. To generate the emotion of anger, you will have to have lost something. There is no other way for anger to rise. Perhaps you've lost your importance, security, wallet, romance, job? When you are really pissed off, take a moment to figure out what you have lost. Sure enough, it will be there. Loss of prestige, loss of rhythm, loss of a promise, loss of a dream — loss of many things that you probably didn't need anyway. Once you notice what you've lost, the next move for a spiritual person is to absolutely, categorically agree to lose it. Rather than taking the loss personally, engaging the ego, and talking about justice and rights, just shrug and acknowledge what has happened. When you don't resist, you are free.

There are certain circumstances where you might feel you should chase after what you have lost, but 99 percent of the time it is incredibly futile. When you lose things, it's only the God force being kind to you. It's liberating you from stuff you honestly don't need. Think how many times you've been in a relationship in which the person left and you went absolutely crazy. You couldn't breathe, you couldn't eat, life wasn't worth living. A week later, it felt different. Three months later somebody says, "What happened to whatshisname?" and you say, "Who?"

The other thing to remember about anger is that much of it comes from your early childhood. The dysfunctions, abuse, abandonment, and mistreatment that we suffer in our early years stays with us. The only real way to become a complete person is to look at the pain and the suffering, and release that anger. Sometimes it's useful to bang cushions or to talk to a therapist, but you can never be completely free of anger unless you go back to those things that are very deeply programmed inside of you — the things that caused you hurt, pain, guilt, and resentment in your early years.

How Can I Be Free of Fearful Thoughts?

Q: How can I be free from the negative and fearful thoughts and emotions that dominate me?

A: Don't let yourself become a victim of your emotions. When you are scared, it isn't the real you that is scared, it is your personality interpreting circumstances that may be adverse. You are not these emotions; they don't own you. As you begin to understand that you don't belong to your emotions, then you can detach from them. It's simply a matter of saying, "I won't be victimised by my emotions".

Don't make the mistake of confusing your emotions with your feelings. Your feelings are inside the etheric. They are 500,000 times faster than you think they are. They are quick, they can move anywhere, they can look at anything. What you think are your feelings are just emotional or physical sensations, and for the most part, they are crawling along at very slow speeds. You are not these emotions. When you are scared, your personality and ego lead you to believe that you are the fear. But you can't be. It's impossible for that to happen to you. You exist as a spirit beyond these things.

If you have reconciled fear, you are free. If you accept your life, you are free. If you don't resist, you are free. It's only the ego that says you have to have a pain-free existence. It's only the ego that says you shouldn't die. It's only the ego that says you have to have glamour and importance. It's only the ego that says you have to follow the path that it wants you to follow. It's nonsense. Life will go the way it goes. And when you don't fight it, you're free. The less you fight it, the less anguish and negativity you create.

When you think about it, there is no negative energy upon our Earth plane. We live in a 100 percent positive dimension, a pure dimension of spirituality and goodness. The only form of negative energy we can experience amounts to nothing more than contradictions of the ego's opinions. If your ego believes you should be immortal and you drop dead, it's a contradiction. If your ego believes you should not experience pain and you hit your thumb with a hammer, it's a contradiction. In fact, if you didn't have an ego parliament inside your head, you could not experience negativity.

Animals live in an absolutely positive dimension. Even if an animal breaks a leg and is in pain, it doesn't think, My God, this is ghastly. It doesn't have a concept of ghastly. It doesn't have an opinion that says a broken leg is worse than a healthy leg. It has pain sensations running up its leg, but it doesn't have an opinion that resists the experience. So as you give away the resistance and reconcile death, and as you understand the incredible heroism and beauty of this existence, you can free yourself.