When people use irritability as a coping mechanism, they spray their energy about haphazardly. Their frothy diatribes spiral into whirlpools of argument that miss the point and expire in eddies. Only the most cool-headed people can absorb, divert and channel it away. When someone feels a spurt of anger, the levee breaks, they become turbulent and noisy like white water. They burst the banks of their reserve, overflow channels of communication, swamp their surroundings, capsize everybody’s buoyancy, dampen their spirits and precipitate that sinking feeling.
If their anger becomes extreme, it goes beyond foaming, to iciness. That is wrath of the most vicious type. When people become angry their faces turn red. But when their anger escalates exceptionally their colour ‘drains’ to whiteness, the symbolic colour of the water element (this refers to what is called the natural symbolic arrangement of the five elements, their attributes according to Dzogchen). The blood runs cold. The tone of voice becomes ‘chilly’. The body posture freezes. That chill running through the body is the energetic connection between anger and fear. Fear is the water element’s primal, visceral objection to spaciousness, as if Space presented an icicle-sharp threat to the sense of identity.
Someone whose fear is triggered by angry people may erect defensive dykes against them. Or fear of vulnerability irritates them to the extent of becoming liable to anger in turn. Sometimes another’s overweening attitude or wit leaves a person lost for words, bottled-up with embarrassment. Then too late, on the way home, indignancy arises, amour propre, and with it, startlingly, an unwonted reflective intelligence or clarity. In this esprit d’escalier, ‘staircase attitude’, that which one dreams up too late while heading for the exit, one replays the scene precisely, dreaming up effortlessly just the most telling phrases one wishes had come to mind at the time. The white-hot extremity of anger arises inseparable from clarity, which is its intrinsic liberated aspect. This is why people find themselves developing extraordinary qualities, such as a killingly accurate memory and deadly vocabulary. This extreme of precision never fails to find the spot where it will needle the other person with the most incisive, penetrating remarks, where it will hurt most exquisitely. All the sense fields feel transformed in the moment. Physical sight, hearing, language, intelligence, suddenly become as if pristine. Extremely angry people have eyes in the back of their heads, notice infinitesimal body-language and eye movements, pick up whispered conversation, and riposte with javelin brutality. Ordinarily quite mild, kind people suddenly brandish terrifying weapons of behaviour.
Horrible as this may seem, it is none other than a distorted symbol of the crystalline clarity that is the liberated quality of the water element. When the arising anger feels as if it has spontaneously and unexpectedly flipped into some new mode, whether that feels more liberated or more constricted, either will show some trace of this lucidity. This is the mirror wisdom which one finds in the deeps of the neurosis. The clarity of a mountain pool facilitates vision, to its very depths. Of course, one could see even more clearly if there were no water there at all – but the presence of water, by virtue of its intrinsic qualities, draws one’s attention to clarity. At the same time there is an extremely clear reflection of oneself on the surface, and third, one can see reflected another person on the other side of the pool. Taking these three together, one can see others as mirroring ones own qualities, both unenlightened and enlightened, by virtue of the profundity of water.
In the fourth empowerment, the crystal phase of a dBang, the piece of quartz mixes transparency and obscurity, as we do ourselves. If there is a sense of transmission during that phase, a spike of clarity leaps up and illuminates all our ordinarily baffled senses, nails them to their intrinsic realisation. Self, others, and phenomena are visibly absorbed and reborn – equalised as scintillating reflections of primordial energy. This clarity which perceives connection and similarity brims from the harmoniousness of the earth element and spills into the warm outreaching compassion of the fire element.