An upset can be caused by undelivered communications
Werner Erhard said that upsets derive from three circumstances: frustrated expectations, thwarted intentions, and undelivered communications. (1)
What they all have in common is we didn’t get what we wanted or we got what we didn’t want – and we’re mad. It’s infantile behavior. Nothing higher-dimensional about it, except for Moses.
Instead of “upsets,” for the purpose of this article, I’m just going to call it “anger.”
We haven’t yet learned to simply listen to anger. We get spooked by it. Most people would place anger on the spectrum of human behavior as a negative ten. All bad things seem to arise from it – and very few good ones.
President Trump, it seems to me, is a master at using his controlled anger to advantage. President Putin seems to be a master at transcending his. They complement each other, like lock and key.
When we don’t get what we want, even from infancy, emotional or otherwise, for whatever reason, we drop our love for the other. We withhold ourselves. We focus our extreme negativity (hatred, jealousy, whatever) on them, and attempt to force them to fulfill our wish.
Hitler thrived on anger. And it killed him. Mussolini loved scolding. And he ended up being hung upside down at a gas station. Stalin was so feared for his anger that, when he lay choking to death on the floor, no one dared enter the room for fear of disturbing him.
We all resort to it, but then we have to clean up afterwards.
Download There is No Greater Gift than Listening – Vol. 3. Leaving the Cycle of Conflict at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/There-is-No-Greater-Gift-than-Listening-V3-Leaving-the-Cycle-of-Conflict-R13.pdf
As an aside, I do know one other human being who can endure anger and process it in a couple of hours and emerge untouched. Not me. That’s way ahead of me. (I hear Sitara saying: “Don’t make that thought concrete.”)
At last I feel confidence seeing for myself – that is, getting it or realizing it – that anger simply derives from us not getting what we want or getting what we don’t want. We don’t like it and, as the movie said, we’re not going to take it any more. (Network.)
This is the handle, the way in for me, as an urban monk and dyed-in-the-wool introvert. The obvious option is to reduce my wants. This is not unwelcome. Because I know what transformative love is, so my needs are greatly reduced. I have what I want already.
If you asked me what’s left? What do you want? I’d say, I’d like to have the Midas Touch, that everything I touch turns to love. ♥
The reason I need to focus in on anger is because a part of me still loves it. As a person who was dissociated from age 7 to 58, the only time I’d come together and be my full majestic self was when I got angry. The Humpty Dumpty Man briefly came back together again. I liked what I saw.
The final fusing took place in a long-distance call with my therapist brother Paul when I was 58, in which I practically became white hot with anger. And I fused at that moment and was whole again.
But that was just being out of the ocean and on dry land. There were plenty of “what’s next’s?” to go through – as you know, having listened to me clear my vasanas or core issues (the wreckage) over the years. (2)
I am not today the person I was, say, at the turn of the century. I mean that in a personal-growth sense rather than a spiritual sense. I can actually see the unfoldment by looking back.
Let matters go, I counsel myself. Remember what’s important. Sri Krishna:
Be angry, and you confuse the mind;
Confuse your mind, you forget the lesson of experience;
Forget experience, you lose discrimination;
Lose discrimination, and you miss life’s only purpose.” (3)
Incarnated life’s only purpose is to teach us how to discriminate between the Real and the unreal. The purpose of life is to know who we are. Knowing who we are involves distinguishing the Real from the unreal. It’s an event in awareness, knowledge, discrimination.
Anger causes us to lose our discernment, our discrimination.
I know that, where I’m going, I’m going to need all the discrimination I can beg or borrow from Heaven. The mission is so much more important than having what I want or getting what I don’t want. As I’ll explore in another article, it’s also so much bigger than the felt need to take credit.
Download There is No Greater Gift than Listening – Vol. 3. Leaving the Cycle of Conflict at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/There-is-No-Greater-Gift-than-Listening-V3-Leaving-the-Cycle-of-Conflict-R13.pdf
There is No Greater Gift than Listening V3 Leaving the Cycle of Conflict R13Footnotes
(1) In the est Training, Nov. 1979.
(2) See Vasanas: Preparing For Ascension by Clearing Old Issues at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Vasanas-Preparing-for-Ascension-R16.pdf
(3) Sri Krishna in Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, trans., Bhagavad-Gita. The Song of God. New York and Scarborough: New American Library, 1972; c1944, 42.