"In a sense, Zen is a religious practice. Religion really means to rejoin that which seems to be separate. Zen practice helps us to do that. But it’s not a religion in the sense that there’s something outside of ourselves that’s going to take care of us… Because true practice and religion help us to rejoin what seems to be separate, all practice has to be about anger. Anger is the emotion that separates us. It cuts everything right in two."
From: Nothing Special: Living Zen. Charlotte Joko Beck

I have been reading about the young man who killed so many people at Virginia Tech; some of the articles about him are linked on this blog page. At first, we were hearing that he had been bullied or picked on in high school, and that reminded us of what we had heard about the boys at Columbine. More recently, we heard that he had been extremely quiet all his life, and that family members and neighbors all had noted his very unusual behavior. He appears to have been nearly totally detached from others; he also appears to have harbored and stoked a gigantic rage. He did, apparently, make some efforts to make social contact with a couple of young women, but he went about it in such a way as to guarantee that they would reject his advances. In college, classmates and teachers were routinely frightened or alarmed by him. He rarely, if ever, spoke to his roommates in the dorm.

I read about all of this with great sadness. The horrific harvest of death and grief brought about by this young man's resentment toward humanity is impossible to understand. How can he have felt that what he did was justified? What did he mean when he said to the camera that it was "your" fault, or our fault, that he murdered people who never caused him the slightest harm?

Diagnostically speaking, he is difficult to assess. Antisocial Personality Disorder? Apparently not; he did not show a pattern of taking advantage of others. Paranoia certainly appears to be part of the picture; he hated others who had never hurt him. He wrote about his violent fantasies, and it appears that he encouraged himself in increasing the magnitude of his anger and desire for retribution. Possibly he had crossed the line from paranoid, schizoid, and/or schizotypal personality into a state in which he experienced full-blown delusions. I suspect that his hatred made him feel powerful, and that he revelled in it, enhancing it because it felt "good" to him. In the end, he may have turned himself into a killer simply because there was nothing else in his life, other than his hatred, that felt good to him.

On a horrific scale, this serves as a reminder to me that, although anger and even hatred are normal emotional experiences, they can be indulged only at great peril. When I experience a flash of anger, when I find myself dwelling on some slight or injustice done to me, my job is to compassionately notice and accurately name that experience, and then shift focus to something else: my breath, or the sky, or the sensations of my feet as I walk across campus. Today, the sky is blue, and the earthmovers are rattling and roaring outside my window as dorm construction continues...