When somebody says something that makes you angry and you wish they would go away, please look deeply with the eyes of impermanence. If he or she were gone, what would you really feel?
Would you be happy or would you weep? Practising this insight can be very helpful. There is a gatha, or poem, that we can use to help us:
Angry in the ultimate dimension
I close my eyes and look deeply.
Three hundred years from now
Where will you be and where shall I be?
When we are angry, what do we usually do? We shout, scream, and try to blame someone else for our problems.
But looking at anger with the eyes of impermanence, we can stop and breathe. Angry at each other in the ultimate dimension, we close our eyes and look deeply. We try to see three hundred years into the future.
What will you be like? What will I be like? Where will you be? Where will I be? We need only to breathe in and out, look at our future and at the other person's future. We do not need to look as far as three hundred years.
It could be fifty or sixty years from now when we have both passed away.
Looking at the future, we see that the other person is very precious to us. When we know we can lose them at any moment, we are no longer angry.
We want to embrace her or him and say: "How wonderful, you are still alive. I am so happy. How could I be angry with you? Both of us have to die someday, and while we are still alive and together it is foolish to be angry at each other."
The reason we are foolish enough to make ourselves suffer and make the other person suffer is that we forget that we and the other person are impermanent. Someday when we die we will lose all our possessions, our power, our family, everything.
Our freedom, peace and joy in the present moment is the most important thing we have. But without an awakened understanding of impermanence, it is not possible to be happy.
Some people do not even want to look at a person when the person is alive, but when the person dies they write eloquent obituaries and make offerings of flowers. At that point the person has died and cannot really enjoy the fragrance of the flowers anymore.
If we really understood and remembered that life was impermanent, we would do everything we could to make the other person happy right here and right now. If we spend 24h being angry at our beloved, it is because we are ignorant of impermanence.
"Angry in the ultimate dimension /I close my eyes." I close my eyes in order to practice visualization of my beloved 100 or 300 yrs from now. When you visualize yourself and your beloved in 300 yrs' time, you just feel so happy that you are alive today and that your dearest is alive today.
You open your eyes and all your anger has gone. You open your arms to embrace the other person and you practice: "Breathing in you are alive, breathing out I am so happy."
In this way, you are practising the meditation on impermanence ie in the ultimate dimension, anger does not exist.
Similarly, with the understanding that hatred is impermanent in the ultimate dimension, it can evaporate in an instant.
~Thich Nhat Hanh
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