In the teachings of the Buddha there is the teaching of four nutriments, or fuels, of consciousness.1 They are the physical food we eat, and then contact, intentions and consciousness itself. That is to say, if mind makes contact with anger, that contact serves as a fuel for mind to grow angry consciousness. This means that if you enter a room, a bus, or meeting, and there is a lot of angry consciousness around, the contact with these surroundings will lead to you becoming angry as well, often not even knowing it was because of these surroundings.
It helps to understand consciousness as a continually emergent stream, as something that can flow through a room. This way, sometimes a space or crowd can have a vibe to it that is felt as either contstricted or expansive.
Understood in this way, we can also understand anger and greed as creating pollution in the pond, making it more difficult for wholesome, healthy consciousness to grow.
Anger and greed can be seen as polluting, because it fetters, constricts or enslaves consciousness: the consciousness is forced by the anger to see things in a certain colored way. If there is clinging to the anger, it is as though the consciousness is forcibly looking for things to justify its own anger. It is the same with Greed, and Delusion.
All of these things constrict consciousness. It is enough to recognize first noble truth: there is suffering. And then subsequently the second: that this suffering arises because there is too much craving or pressure, in addition to the third and fourth which are about the cessation of this suffering: taking a step back, and replacing it with something more wholesome.
That in itself can be a helpful point of practice: once we see anger as necessarily polluting, we can pre-empt a point where we would be questioning ourselves whether possible anger is justified or not. Instead, as it is necessarily polluting, we can upon recognition of anger decide to prevent or abandon it (the first two right efforts), and instead bring up or continue something that will be wholesome (the last two right efforts).
There is another reason why greed or sensory desire are problematic. And it is because it is from without consent. If someone enters the room with cookies, or there is someone attractive walking past, if there is greed of lust there could arise a private fantasy about the consummation of that mental object that has been construed or prepared by that same greed. But it is a carrot on a stick: a projection on an always private screen; it can never be actually possessed. And it then fuels or grows a consciousness that, in proportion to the clinging, wants to preserve itself, craving new food, creating intentions or underlying tendencies by which this shrub can take up more space in mind. And so when we think we want something, we have to be mindful of which consciousness it is that wants that, and if that is wholesome or unwholesome. Once we don’t give it what it wants, it craves, and that is suffering. But rather than giving into it, we need to wean off of it, and replace it with something else.
The fact that there cannot ever be, within the context of two screens being grasped at, any true consent is in and of itself problematic. But sensory desire and greed increase in this ‘privitization’ or establishment of separate consciousnesses. Even though there really is never any actual satisfaction. Because the consciousness that craves never gets the object: it at best prepares a new mental object, and if a contact arises with that object, there is actually another, new consciousness arising dependent upon the object and the sense base.2 This consciousness is (without knowing it) ‘jammed’ into the driver seat, forced by the fetter of greed to look at, or pay attention to, whatever object the previous consciousness made for it. The ignorance of it is like a pole in the ground that causes us to walk in circles around it, trying to find objects that are agreeable to this fettered consciousness.3 But really we need to just abandon the whole place altogether, through knowledge of suffering, its cause, the knowledge of its cessation and its cause which is the eight-fold practice.
Rejecting anger, greed as fuel. Instead rooting mind in the practice of generosity: inclining it such that, if someone brings in cookies, the mind inclines to altruistic joy for the many that these cookies are available, not having any expectations; instead rooting mental, verbal and bodily actions in the heart-qualities of Goodwill, compassion, joy, equanimity. Doing so develops an even better view, right view, on the unwholesomeness of greed and aversion. This leads to disenchantment with the world, dispassion, and finally liberation.
Meditation 