A spoken monologue encouraging the listener to cultivate deep, gut-level awareness of their own aggression (defined broadly to include frustration, impatience, irritability, and any form of "againstness"). The speaker frames this awareness as a developmental practice that reduces impulsive reactivity, supports peace and compassion, and requires lifelong honesty and vulnerability. The passage invites visualization of awareness being stronger than aggressive impulses and underscores benefits for intimacy and psychological/spiritual maturation.
So in this stage of development, which almost all of us are humbly not very far along in the path, we're going to attempt to learn how to become more and more aware of, of our own aggression. And by aggression, I do mean the broadest form that you could possibly imagine in any way that you're against, including frustration, impatience, irritability, any kind of againstness. All of that would be what I'm calling aggression. Each of us needs to develop what could be referred to as a much broader and deeper awareness of aggression so that it's not just an intellectual thing, but it actually becomes deeper and deeper in our guts, so that our awareness becomes capable of stopping us from immediately being impulsively reactive in our environments. Now, this is an incredibly profound stage of development. So as we're even talking about it right now, let your imagination go and really start to visualize the possibility. Here you are being impatient, and actually you have this dynamic capacity for awareness where it can become even more powerful than the aggression itself. So again, imagine your awareness is actually capable of becoming more dynamic than the aggressive impulse itself. Now, I realize that sounds a little grandiose and for most of us, very unrealistic, a very high percentage of the time, but it's helpful to see that we're all trying to raise our percentage. When we're on the path of attempting to be more peaceful and more kind and compassionate in the world and being able to have this deeper relationship towards aggression where we can see it with a capital S. Seeing it, really seeing it from our guts is incredibly beneficial. Congratulate yourself for even attempting to put significant attention on this. Whether it's while you're watching this right now or it's throughout the day or when you wake up in the morning, when you go to bed at night. None of us can give our awareness of our aggression too much time. It is an act of real peace when we care enough for ourselves and for those around us to dedicate ourselves in a deeper way towards being aware of our aggression. This is a lifelong practice, and it requires deep integrity, deep honesty, an ability to witness where we are. And it will result in a bit of a loss of what we normally would call control. Because normally when we're aggressive, we're trying to control things, and it might make us feel a little bit more uncomfortable. But our willingness to feel vulnerable is a big part of maturing as a soul, psychologically and spiritually, and it is a key to developing our capacity to be intimate with others and to be intimate with ourselves.
