If you use your anger consciously, it will pay off and you wont feel guilty about it also, I assure you. You should never get disturbed by your own anger. If you get disturbed, it means that you have you have not gone through anger with awareness; you have allowed anger to overtake you. This is the scale to see if you have used anger properly! A small story: Once a sadhu a wandering mendicant, was passing through a village, when he received a complaint from the villagers about a cobra that was playing havoc with their lives. The sadhu was known to have the power to communicate with animals, so they begged him to convince the cobra to spare the villagers. So the sadhu spoke to the cobra, and the cobra promised not to bite any of the villagers anymore.

A few months later, the sadhu was passing through the same village when he came upon the cobra, badly bruised and almost dead. What happened to you? Why are you hurt? Asked the sadhu. The cobra cried, O sadhu! It is you who made me promise never to bite the villagers! I have kept my promise to this day. But the villagers, who were earlier in fear of me, took my mildness to be weakness. Seeing that I dont bite, they started torturing me everyday. See what a state I have been reduced to! The sadhu replied, My poor foolish friend! I only asked you not to bite the people. Did I ask you not to hiss at them? You need to use anger in the right way in the right quantities.

Anger is a tremendous energy if we know how to use it rightly. Knowledge about anger reduces anger. Many people come to me and tell me, 'swamiji, I love my wife so much. That is why I want her to change for the better! That's why I fight with her. I tell them, You dont love your wife; you love the image that you carry in your mind. You love your image and whenever your wife acts as you expect her to act, you love her. Your real love is not for your wife; it is for your mental image. If you really loved your wife, you would change your image to suit your wife, but if you love your image, then you will try to change your wife to fit the image.

Most of us love our images. This is the truth. This is the beginning of unrest in our homes. This is the beginning of an intimate war! Honestly I tell you, lovers are intimate enemies. They are intimate but constantly on guard. They are constantly trying to dominate each other. There is a close enmity between them, which they call intimacy. Real intimacy is when you are totally relaxed with the other. That is real intimacy. Question: Swamiji, what you are saying is that we should accept the other person completely, with all his faults? No! Even the word accept carries a feeling of condemnation. When you say the words with all his faults, it is like a silent complaint. It is like saying, What to do, we have to live with it.

No! I tell you, welcome the other person into your life, just as he or she is. There is a difference between accepting and welcoming. Accepting is like making a compromise. Welcoming is opening out your being to the other person without any expectation, unconditionally. The whole of creation is a gift to you from Existence. Receive it with grace and humility. When you do this, the tremendous energy of the muladhara chakra is opened to you. To awaken this chakra is to touch a perennial source of energy. The tremendous energy that is now locked in imagination, expectation and greed can be made available for creativity, for business, for life, and for reality! Not only that, you will find your house becoming a kshetra, a shrine of peace.

Our houses are meant to be dharmakshetras abodes of righteousness, but they have become kurukshetras abodes of war! And why have they become abodes of war? Because we are chiseling human beings. If we chisel idols or wood, we can make beautiful forms and furniture, but if we chisel human beings, only trauma will follow. One man asked me, 'swamiji can you please tell me a way to find a connection with the eighteen-handed Devi.