The impulses of anger and resentment are always experienced in the body as a no. However, we have a window to express them as their original impulse before they convert to their emotional form. Once we have allowed the impulses to be converted to the emotions of anger, outrage, or resentment, we have removed ourselves from the source of these impulses.
At the level of impulse, the response is virtuous. At the level of emotion, the response often becomes more and more non-virtuous. Non-virtuous means we are looking at and judging the person at whom these emotions are directed. We become our egoic tumescent response. The emotion of anger is always tumescence, invariably taking us outside of ourselves.
Allowing anger to build up, pretending it is not there, does not mean we are not tumesced. By ignoring it, we may hit the point where we need to express it, and then it will come out unconsciously. What Eros wants us to do is to trace the anger back inward to find its initial eroticized form, returning to its Erotic intelligence and to impulse, without the story on top.
Bringing it back into ourselves results in an internal locus of power. If we focus on something outside of ourselves, it results in a loss of power. Eventually, we want to be able to transform resentment to the level of impulse. To do that, we have to trace the resentment to the stage where it was the emotion of anger in order to re-experience the original impulse of it.
We have to be willing to go there, and sit with the anger, feeling through it without falling into it, in order to return to the level of impulse. We do not stop at feeling angry; we let ourselves feel it all the way through until the charge is run out. We then draw that energy that was trapped in resentment and anger back into ourselves, aiming it back in, so we can harness the power of the impulse for directed purposes.
The most extreme form of resentment is punitiveness. We can only get that far outside of ourselves, out to the punitive self, when we forget we are connected to everyone. We have to be disconnected to be in that place.
To trace our way back through all this self-will, we must trace back to the contemptuous self to the outraged self to the resentful self to the angry self—and finally to the impulse of no-self. The distance from the contemptuous self to the no-self is a measure of how far we have gotten from ourselves by the time we become punitive.
When the emotion of anger is driving us, a disconnected part of us is relating to another disconnected part. For example, a self disconnected from knowing is relating to a self disconnected from impulse. They are interacting, but there is no one behind the wheel driving any of it.
All parts must be met at a deliberate, continuous, unceasing level of impulse. That is the liberation of owning one’s own mind. It is liberation because we will not be dragged into all these reactive, emotional states; there is no self-identity inside of any of them. It is just a host of programs interacting with each other.