Are Demons Real? —PART 2

August 10th, 2010 |

MEET the DEMONS

Visit-Mati Klarwein

Making Sense

If a group of 20 of us looked at a yellow chair, we can be fairly confident that close to 100% will agree that, yes, it is indeed a chair and it really is yellow. So far so good for consensual, shared reality. But already when it comes to the more refined senses of taste or sound, some (like a wine-taster) might be far more sensitive than others. Here we are not talking about likes or dislikes, or opinions, but just the raw sensing of things. Go beyond the myth of those five senses, and ask someone how the room “feels,” or what the “vibe” of a person walking into the room is, and we start to have a problem.

Getting Real

Just like a yellow chair, there are facts about a room, or the person who just walked in. Yes, you could focus on one or another aspect of something, but there really, really is a very specific energy to a room, or a person (albeit a complex one). This is no more a “matter of opinion” than the yellow chair. Here, sensitivity starts to vary enormously, from 0% on up. And for those who can’t directly feel these things, it is hard to accept that others actually can. What happened? While there are a dozen solid reasons why we are “desensitized” to the most obvious things about the world, three main soul-killers seem to stand out.

Over-stimulation

Every year the ads gets louder, more frenetic, more outrageous and more irritating, because advertising humanoids know full well that subtle doesn’t work. A solid blow across the head with a large stick seems to be required. The ongoing trends in music, movies, fashion, marketing, eating habits—all blatantly show how the volume keeps ramping up to break through our progressively hardened senses and shut-down energy bodies.

Over-intellectualiztion

Since the dawn of the “Age of Reason” several centuries ago, we have been pummeled with the dogma of the greatest religion the world has ever known, Scientific Materialism. If you cant sense it, or measure it (with an extension of the senses), it ain’t there. And you are crazy or a superstitious primitive to think it is. Apart from a rationalization for the global colonization of the “heathens” of the non-Western world, this had a tremendous chilling effect in believing our own eyes and ears.

In this way, I would estimate that fully 70% of our human capacity is amputated. The human soul is castrated from its ability to actually feel the sizzling, percolating reality around us, and confined to a stale compendium of things and names.

Over-intoxification

Why humanity likes to poison itself is food for another long discussion. But a world of pervasive neurotoxins, including heavy metals, medical drugs, vaccines, fluorides, several hundred thousand chemical additives, industrial pollutants and self-imbibed poisons such as alcohol, tobacco and artificial sweeteners, take their toll. The cumulative effect is staggering in terms of stupefying and anesthetizing our neurological “wetware.”

Enter the Mystic

This would all be academic, except for one thing. The Vajrayanist, and especially the Chöpa, is a mystic, a practitioner who deals directly with the vital forces of the universe. It is not for the dry intellectual, the emotionally dead, or the sensually challenged. Like Vajrayana as a whole, Chöd is about engaging the world in its most raw, naked form. Chöd starts in reality, not in the stale, shadow world of those who live in the prison of their heads, populated by the sterile thought-forms of others, themselves long departed.

First, Meet the World

Are demons real? For those that encounter them, they are. For those that do not, they can start by walking in nature and feeling the powerful life force that is present there. Refine it down to the stories in a blade of grass or a flower petal. Listen to the wind. Hear the messages spoken to you within the sunbeams, the clouds and the call of the black crow in the morning mist. When life is that real, the spirit beings of the land, the non-human entities and the demonic forces can also be sensed and felt. And if we keep up our Dharma practice, we have the Vajra confidence to meet them on their own ground.
And then let the healing begin!