Facing Your Demons

William B. Turner
2 min readJun 22, 2024

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.

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