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!
Stay tuned for Are Demons Real-Part 3



1. Demon wisperer – I love it! Your picture in this context is really cool!
2. As a recovering Scientific Materialist I would call it rather belief system than religion. Which probably does not matter at all.
3. I would not blame it on commercials only. I have no TV, do not listen to radio or so called “music” (music I like nobody else wants to listen to) and still just being in the office and dealing with people’s issues crates to much in my head. Seems like our culture goesa this way: everybody competes for attention by putting volume higher.
Beside that I like the way you put it.
Again, Lama Jinpa presents a bone full of juicy meat to chew on… high octane stuff! This discussion is really quite important!
The whole “if you can measure it, it exists and if you can’t measure it then it doesn’t exist” approach reflects (as Ken McLeod has pointed out) the preoccupation of Western philosophy with onthology, in contrast with the Buddhist emphasis on epistemology. Frankly, I think the arrogant interpretative prerogative of the quantitative paradigm of the Enlightenment will be the bane of Western culture and civilization. It is a great and powerful servant, but a merciless master. This paradigm cannot account for life in full because not everything can be measured. Nor can it adress the great questions of life. And how would you quantify, and measure “Boddhichitta”?
Furthermore, if demons are mere psychological projections and not real in a relative sense, then presumably other disembodied entities do not exist either. (Unless one thinks all disembodied entities are non-demonic – which seems blantantly absurd in a Buddhist perspective.) If there are no disembodied entities, then it will be very difficult to make sense of the concept of pure land, form and formless realms. It would then also seem that of the six realms only the animal and human realm would be “real” while the other realms would presumably only be reflecting various states of mind. From that, I gather that one could only be reincarnated as a human or animal which would invalidate the endlessness of Samsara. I could go on and on and on, but my (albeit ignorant) concern about the deeply problematic implications of reducing demons to the status of psychological projections in Tibetan Buddhism should be clear enough. Or did I miss something?