It's the funniest thing, how people are expected to deal with negative emotions. Take anger, for example. People actually believe anger can be useful. People who feel angry are urged to express that anger. Punch a pillow. Write a letter to the editor. Blow something up, whether it's someone's peace of mind or a bus station where the wives and children of your enemies are standing.

And we wonder why things in this world never get any better. People must express themselves, or, more exactly, express the negative emotions that seize them and make monsters of them.

We seem to accept this awful state as somehow normal. Whenever someone has come along and said not to act on negative emotions such as anger, they're dismissed as kooks or cranks or flash-in-the-pan messiahs. People like St. Francis. Gandhi. Jesus Christ. It's all too ludicrous to believe that containing one's anger—turning the other cheek, in one famous formulation—could have the least effect on the human condition. We all know better.

Turn the other cheek? Come on. It's so much more . . . empowering to give in to the urge to pound the table, pound the point home, pound the hell out of your neighbor.

Take the Christian approach as an example. A priest reads the New Testament with new eyes. He sees the message of peace in the words of Jesus. Yes, he will turn the other cheek. He will see that his parishioners do likewise. Together, they will spread the good news, even unto the infidels. The priest, enflamed with holy vision, will mount the charger of righteousness, and he will see that all who stand in the way of God's wonderful message of peace and love will be persuaded to take the cross, or the stake.

It's a slippery thing, anger. As with all our emotions, it's quick and intoxicating, a whirlwind that leaves in its wake its own set of wonderfully balanced intellectual justifications: It's a holy war. A just war. A war to end all wars. You want an update, read the front pages. Read today's, read yesterday's. Go as far back as words or ink or letters carved in stone will take you. It's the same story.

But don't get angry about any of this. It's merely an example of the idiocy of the counsel everybody has gotten through the ages. Feeling angry? Let it out. Do a little venting. It's good for you.

Truth is, it's not good for you or for anybody else. Give anger expression and it grows and so do its manifestations. That's the beauty of Jesus's view of the issue. Don't give in to anger. Don't return it. Break the chain of inevitability. The free and unrelenting expression of negative emotions everywhere has gotten us to where we are today. Can anyone seriously claim that anger serves a useful purpose in this horror-struck world?

Refusing to give anger a chance, an outlet, is the first step in controlling it. Contain it, and watch yourself as you do. It won't be easy for several reasons. You've given in to it all your life, after all, so often you don't even recognize it. Perhaps you recognize it, but insist on seeing it as somehow useful. And, of course, all emotions are so fast that to try to stop them while you're being struck by their lightening is impossible.

Nevertheless, difficult though it is, you have to start somewhere, and since you can't control your anger without long effort, the first thing you have to do is to put a cork in it. Don't mutter dark imprecations to the radio on the ride to work. Don't go looking for trouble. Watch what you're thinking. Somebody invites you to join in some good-natured review of a colleague's latest idiocy, stuff a doughnut in your mouth.

Take a look at the landscape of your daily life. The idea is that all your life you've walked through this landscape, inhaled its fragrances, walked its weedy and twisted paths, thinking you were in some kind of garden. It's a garden cultivated by your unconscious attention. You've drawn on its poisoned fruits to sustain you. Now, for perhaps the first time in your life, you've come to understand that these fruits are slowly killing you.

The fact is, by constantly expressing negative emotions (of which anger is only one), you've kept the garden alive and thriving. You've developed a taste for its fruits. You can't imagine any other way of life.

Which is, of course, backwards. The garden you're standing in is a desert. It can't sustain life, it can only diminish it. Its poisons don't kill you immediately. They're slow-acting. They bleach the color from your day, keep you in a tailspin of despair, make you old before your time. Being old can be a time in which wisdom blossoms, but nothing blossoms that's been planted in sand.

Do you need any more reason to try something different? If you find yourself standing in a garden nurtured by unconscious attention, why not try applying a conscious strain of attention? You have to watch, to examine whatever negative emotion you find yourself entangled in. To do this kind of watching, you need a kind of energy you're probably not familiar with. The energy that you've spent your life blowing off in anger, like smoke from an industrial stack, can be harnessed, or, at least in the beginning, not wasted in the usual way. You can conserve that energy and use it to increase your ability to watch. This is another reason why the old advice to express your anger is so bogus.

With effort, with practice, you can begin to explore the garden of your negativity and examine it. You can yank up the flowers of anger and see them for what they are. You'll be able to see the ideas that gave birth to this particular flower. Maybe it was something as simple as your mother once telling you that the only way she ever got your father to do anything was by getting angry with him. And that long-forgotten idea has taken root in the life and made it what it is.

It's up to every individual to explore the garden they've built for themselves, to yank up these poisonous flowers and discover their root. The best way to kill a plant is to expose its root to the light. The light of watching, powered by the energy usually wasted by the free expression of negative emotions, can do exactly that.