Facing Your Demons

Alan Watts, the famous popular interpreter of Buddhism, especially Zen, liked to talk about how Carl Jung, the prominent psychoanalyst, insisted that well adjusted humans had to acknowledge and accept what we might call our demons.

According to Jung via Watts, we all have them. One of many reasons why meditation is a very useful practice, and the central practice of Buddhism, is that it gives us a mechanism by which we can look at our darkest, meanest thoughts, bubbling in our subconscious, gradually and with compassion. If you keep up a consistent meditation practice long enough, you will likely stumble on thoughts you were not previously aware of that horrify you, or would horrify other people if you stated them aloud, which you do not have to do. You are not under oath. You should tell the truth, but you do not have to tell the whole truth about yourself until and unless you feel the need to for your own reasons.

Facing your own demons is a good practice in its own right, but it is also essential to awakening for a very practical, extra reason.

Few Buddhist teachers talk about the siddhis, or supernatural powers that accompany awakening. The Buddha did not talk about them much. He forbade his followers from displaying their siddhis, thinking that doing so would likely encourage ego clinging and distract from meditation and further awakening.

A well known siddhi is the power to read minds. I think I have mentioned the story about the meditation teacher who learned that a student was learning meditation in order to be able to read minds. The teacher wondered why anyone would want to collect other people’s garbage.

The bigger concern that I have, and here I reveal myself, is that having supernatural powers is potentially dangerous if one would use them to harm anyone. Recall that much of the dramatic tension in the movie, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, comes from the woman who learned the Wudan style of fighting from drawings in a manual, but was illiterate, so she could not read the text, which explained the ethical commitments that Wudan fighters usually commit to. She kills several people in the film and dies an ignominious death.

So, as always, a consistent meditation practice is the centerpiece of the Buddhist path in allowing you to face your own demons, which is essential for awakening and beneficial for other reasons.

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