Special thanks to classical
I Think of Demons
by Brad Warner
I woke up at one a.m. from a nightmare of broken shapes and unfamiliar sensations into a waking nightmare of inescapable panic, in a cold sweat, my heart racing. The only thing in my mind was sheer black terror.
I sat up, looked around. Indistinct shapes in the dark. Where was I? Not at home. I was on the floor. A big room. A temple. I was in a temple. It was Tokei-in temple. I recited it to myself. Tokei-in temple in Shizuoka. The strange shapes were other people sleeping in the room, all of them friends. It was the first night of the Summer Zazen retreat. There was nothing anywhere near me that could do me the least harm.
Then why was I so afraid? Wake-up call was at 4:30 when the next day's Zazen was set to begin. No one wants to be gotten up at one o'clock when they have to get up again just four hours later. So I tiptoed out of the sleeping room, slid open the ancient wooden door as quietly as possible and went to the main hall of the temple. At least there were lights on out there.
Here I was in surroundings of complete serenity devoting my days to the pursuit of inner peace through the silent practice of Zazen. What could possibly be less frightening? Still my breath came in panting gasps and my pajamas were soaked with sweat. I was shivering as hard as a naked man sitting on a block of ice, although the night was pleasantly cool. I had never felt such panic in my life. If I'd been being pursued across an open field by a tribe of hungry allosauruses I couldn't have felt more intense fear. All the fear I'd ever felt in my life had descended upon me that night.
I sat on a bench facing the Buddha statue in the center of the main hall, a few feet from the spot where Nishijima Sensei had lectured to us a few hours earlier. I worked hard to try and resume my normal breathing patterns, to hold my body still against the shivering. I tried to think of anything real that was even potentially dangerous around here. Earthquakes? I was awake now so even if there was one, I could get to a safe place. I tried hard, but couldn't think of anything else.
Gradually, I forced myself to return to normal. The dream I'd had was some kind of subconscious message. Something I'd been doing was causing me some kind of distress and I wasn't even aware of it. I thought about the dream and I realized what it was and what I would have to do. As surreal as the images had been, there was a message in them which I could interpret consciously. I was going to have to give up something I really enjoyed in order to save my mental health. It wouldn't be easy, but I resolved to do what had to be done. When my heart rate had settled and I could breathe normally again, I slid back into the sleeping room and crawled into my futon. Eventually I settled my mind enough that I fell into a troubled half-sleep.
Zazen practice is like taking the lid off of a boiling pot. All the stuff inside your mind wells up and spills over the edges. It can be messy.
All day long, every single day, you repress various thoughts and urges that appear in your mind. You have to. All of us have nasty antisocial tendencies. Every last one of us. It ain't just the Nazis, Al Quaeda, the Baby Badger Rapists In Your Very Neighborhood or whatever enemy-of-the-week the media is pushing who want to sodomize helpless farm animals, pull the wings off butterflies and spit on the American flag. It's you. Yes you, sitting there with your finger up your nose reading this on your computer screen. Maybe you don't have any of those specific urges (you believe), but you have others and they're just as nasty and disgusting.
It's all tied in with our self-image, our ego. Everyone has a self image. You have one, I have one, Dogen, Nagarjuna and Gautama Buddha had one too. The difference is the way a Buddhist views his or her self image.When a person who understands Buddhism uses the word "I," the word is just a convenient way of locating something. "I" is used in the same way most people would use "the chair," as in, "Put the book on the chair." You don't have any really strong attachment to the chair. You know it's really just a bunch of boards held together with nails and screws, that the boards had their origins as parts of trees and the nails and screws were once parts of rocks in the ground. The chair will come apart eventually. But none of its components will ever really disappear. They just change form. And though they don't disappear, there comes a time when they can no longer be called a chair anymore. After this point you can never reassemble that chair again no matter how hard you try.
It's very difficult to reach this kind of understanding when it comes to your sense of self. We've been taught since birth that our "self" is something fundamental and real. But our "self" isn't really anything but the sum total of those particular things about the universal human nature we've chosen to emphasize in our own lives. Some teachings like to differentiate between "self" and "Self," but this just obscures the problem with unnecessary complications. No matter how you spell it, self is an illusion. Anyone who tells you otherwise is fooling you and himself as well.
Society conditions us to ignore certain aspects of universal human nature because these aspects go against the preservation of society. You can't have a functioning society if people are running around raping, killing and stealing all the time. Raping, killing and stealing are just the tip of the iceberg. There are billions of more subtle urges we all have which are anti-social and these need to be repressed too. Different societies pick different things out of the stew of universal human nature and label these "anti-social." True right and wrong are entirely different from society's definition of right and wrong.
So you go through your whole life repressing this stuff so quickly and efficiently that most of it doesn't even have time to enter into your conscious mind as a thought or idea. But when you do Zazen, you are sitting in a state where these mechanisms of psychological repression begin to become a little more fluid. That's when the demons pop out.
Some people may find these repressed thoughts so alien that they take on abstract shapes or appear in the form of hallucinations. The demons represented in ancient paintings and sculptures or spoken of in old legends are nothing more than this. Those beautiful drawings in Tibetan Buddhist art are representations of all the things that distract a person from finding the truth. It's too bad so many folks get confused and think these depictions are of the truth itself. One time I heard the entire song Kashmir by Led Zeppelin just as if there were a radio next to me. I even looked around to see if someone had brought one into the room.
In traditional Buddhism they call this phenomenon "Makyo" or "the world of demons." Gudo Nishijima, my teacher, will tell you, if you ask about it, that there's no such thing as "makyo." I would not dispute this. There is no such thing as Makyo. There is no World of Demons. But I do think it's important for people who practice Zazen to be aware of this kind of thing from the outset of their practice.
If your Zazen practice is reasonable, if you're not doing too much, or striving too hard to reach some goal of "Enlightenment," you may never experience anything quite like this. Or if you do, you'll only meet up with it at a time when you can handle it. To experience such phenomena is a sign that your practice is maturing. The key is not to get sucked into it. Don't get frightened by the scary ones and don't get seduced by the seductive ones. Above all, preserve your ego. Meditation teachers who tell their students to destroy their egos are the most irresponsible people on Earth. Dogen said that realization doesn't destroy the individual, just like the reflection of the moon in a dewdrop doesn't destroy a dewdrop. A dewdrop is big enough to reflect the whole Universe. It's not that your ego needs to be destroyed. You only need to understand it for what it really is, a mechanism for allowing you to function as part of society.
When these anti social urges come up, you can feel, as I did, that it's evidence you're not a good person. You think you're just pretending to be good when really you have all these terrible urges. Since the terrible urges are part of your mind, you think they must be part of "you," that they are in fact "the real you" and that the nice, normal "you" society knows is just a farce. That's not the way it is at all. That kind of thinking leads a lot of people down very dark paths. They turn to weird religions or drugs in an effort to destroy these thoughts. Or worse, they begin believing they must express their "true self." But everyone everywhere has urges like you do. You can only do good when you understand clearly what bad really is.
When urges to behave badly appear in your mind, you don't give in to them. That's what morality is. The biggest, ugliest, most damaging lie that religions spread is that truly moral people never have immoral thoughts. Bullshit. It's not that you only have moral thoughts. It's that you only act upon the moral thoughts you have. Lust that appears in your heart is not a form of adultery. Adultery is adultery. Lust in your heart is something no one can ever avoid. There are people in this world who set themselves up as being above having "impure thoughts." In America they give folks like this weekly TV shows (thank God, the rest of the world has yet to adopt this custom!). Those people are liars who seek only to manipulate others, getting fat on their guilt. A person can get very wealthy doing this kind of thing.
The shrill clanging of the brass wake-up bell shattered my uneasy rest a scant few hours after my encounter with demons. I got dressed, washed may face and staggered through the cool morning air into the Zazen hall to start another day of staring at a bare brown wooden wall. That morning at the lecture someone asked a question. I can't remember who asked or even what the question was. But in his answer, Nishijima Sensei said, "Just stop drinking alcohol." I caught his eye at that moment. He was looking straight at me. I smiled, he smiled back. I didn't have a drinking problem. In fact I really hate alcohol, never drank much and hadn't had any at all for a few years by then. But what he said penetrated right to the heart of the problem. The words themselves didn't matter. It was direct communication. Did he know it? Did he realize what he'd said? At the moment of direct communication, such things really don't matter.
http://www.hardcorezen.org/
Son of mr. gordo