You can get angry even with things. If you are moving and you are trying to reach somewhere immediately and a chair comes in the way, you get angry with the chair. You try to unlock the door and the key is not working, you become angry with the door. It is absurd, because to be angry with a thing is nonsense. Anything that creates any type of obstruction creates anger.

You have a desire to reach, to do, to achieve something. Whosoever comes in between you and your desire appears to be your enemy – you want to destroy him. This is what anger means: you want to destroy the obstacles. But anger leads to misery, anger becomes an illness so you want not to be angry.

But how can you drop anger if you have desires, goals? If you have desires and goals, then anger is bound to be there because life is complex; you are not alone here on this Earth. Millions of people striving for their own desires, they criss-cross each other, they come into each other’s path. If you have desires then anger is bound to be there, frustration is bound to be there, violence is bound to be there. And your mind will think to destroy whosoever comes in your path.

This attitude to destroy the obstacle is anger. But anger creates misery, so you want not to be angry. But just wanting not to be angry will not be of much help, because anger is part of a greater pattern – of a mind which desires, a mind which has goals, a mind which wants to reach somewhere. You cannot drop anger.

So the first thing is not to desire. Then half of the possibility of anger is dropped; the base is dropped. But then too it is not that anger will disappear necessarily because you have been angry for millions of years. It has become a deep-rooted habit. You may drop desires but anger will still persist. It will not be so forceful, but it will persist because now it is a habit. It has become an unconscious habit. For many, many lives you have been carrying it. It has become your heredity. It is in your cells, the body has taken it. It is now chemical and physiological. Just by dropping your desires your body is not going to change its pattern. The pattern is very old; you will have to change this pattern also.

For that change, repetitive practice will be needed. Just to change the inner mechanism, repetitive practice will be needed – a reconditioning of the whole body-mind pattern. But this is possible only if you have dropped desiring.

Look at it from another point of view. One man came to me and he said, “I don’t want to be sad, but I am always sad and depressed. Sometimes I cannot even feel what is the reason why I am sad, but I am sad. No visible cause, nothing that I can pinpoint that this is the reason. It seems that it has just become my style to be sad. I don’t remember,” he said, “that I was ever happy. And I don’t want to be sad. It is a dead burden. I am the unhappiest person. So how I can drop it?”

So I asked him, “Have you got any investment in your sadness?”

He said, “Why should I have any investment?” – but he had. I knew the person well. I had known the person for many years, but he was not aware that there was some vested interest in it. So he wants to drop sadness, but he is not aware why the sadness is there. He has been maintaining it for some other reasons which he cannot connect.