Anger is part of aversion and aversion is a bigger word to look at. Aversion is always a not wanting, a turning away, a pushing away in any form whatsoever. Anger is on the stronger side of aversion. We get irritation on the lesser side, we get annoyance, it could be big or it could be little. So anger is a very strong pushing away, wanting to destroy. We could also say we want that out of our life! How does it affect the practice in daily life? Usually it affects it negatively, because anger is too strong. Wise aversion is very helpful. It's wise aversion that says to us, like with the question the other day, "Well I don't want to have that wine any more, I want to be an example for others to follow. I'm going to turn away from that action." Wise aversion actually ties in with renunciation, renouncing something because we see that we just don't want it any more, that it's leading us in a wrong direction, no matter what it is. But anger itself is like the extreme of the aversions and it generally just produces a state of mind which kind of blows us away. We can't think clearly, we want to destroy, with a kind of vindictive energy, so we want to stay away from anger as much as possible. If we can, we want to lessen it, we want to change the degrees of it.
Now to a certain extent, most people as they get older, the outward expressions of anger kind of slow down. Kids fighting on the baseball field and whatever else, teenagers will fight with their fists, especially boys, sometimes girls. When they get to be adults, they can still be very cutting with their speech and whatever else, that's often even more vicious than kids on the playfield. And to a certain extent, the outward form slows down, but the inner anger sometimes just gets worse, if people don't deal with it, if they don't know how to let go of the attachment to it. Unfortunately with many psychological approaches, they say that you either suppress or indulge it. Suppression doesn't work because you blow up eventually at one point, indulgence doesn't work because you just make the conditions for you to do it again in the future. More unbeneficial conditioning. This is why Theravadin Buddhism is called the Middle Path. The Middle Path in between, we're going to let go of anger, and everything else that's negative through understanding it, and like I say with the holding onto fire, if you can see, if you can clearly see that anger is burning you and burning others, why do you want to hold onto it?