At some point in your spiritual practice, you will go to the places that scare you and face the monsters that threaten you. Below I describe what happened when I faced my own personal demons during these past few months, and I offer a conceptual framework, an integration of Zen Buddhism and New Age spirituality, that might explain why the confrontation brought such rewards.
New Age in the Light of Zen
There is a significant gap between the experiences characteristic of New Age spirituality and the fundamental emptiness revealed in Zen Buddhism. The tradition of Dzogchen, or Ati yoga (sometimes called “Tibetan Zen”), does a decent job of integrating them, but it often lacks a personal context.
From a New Age perspective, we have good and evil, angels and demons, unity and separation, and power struggles. From a Buddhist perspective, all is mind, nothing is intrinsically good or evil, separation is an illusion, and only the ego, a fabrication of the ordinary mind, engages in what look like power struggles.
Both New Age spirituality and Buddhism recognize that the mind has access to something greater. In Zen Buddhism, practitioners and teachers are aware that deep or prolonged meditation leads to hypnogogic visions. They call it makyo. From The Three Pillars of Zen, by Philip Kapleau Roshi:
Makyo are the phenomena–visions, hallucinations, fantasies, revelations, illusory sensations–which one practicing zazen is apt to experience at a particular stage in his sitting… These phenomena are not inherently bad. They become a serious obstacle to practice if one is ignorance of their true nature and is ensnared by them. The word makyo is used in both a general and a specific sense. Broadly speaking, the entire life of the ordinary person is nothing but a makyo. Even such Bodhisattvas as Monju and Kannon, highly developed though they are, still have about them traces of makyo; otherwise they would be supreme Buddhas, completely free of makyo. One who becomes attached to what he or she realizes through satori is also still lingering in the world of makyo. So, you see, there are makyo even after enlightenment…
The number of makyo which can appear are in fact unlimited… Besides those which involve the vision there are numerous makyo which relate to the sense of touch, smell, or hearing, or which sometimes cause the body suddenly to move… Not infrequently words burst forth uncontrollably… There are even cases where without conscious awareness one writes down things which turn out to be prophetically true…
Other religions and sects place great store by experiences which involve visions of God or deities or hearing heavenly voices, performing miracles, receiving divine messages, or becoming purified through various rites and drugs… In varying degree these practices induce a feeling of well-being, yet from the Zen point of view all are abnormal states devoid of true religious significance and therefore only makyo.
Makyo is also described, among many other side-effects of prolonged meditation (including bliss, rapture, and extrasensory perception), in chapter 4 of The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation by Michael Murphy and Steven Donovan (available online). Many long-term meditation practitioners attest to a heightened sensitivity to the thoughts and feelings of others, even in their physical absence. What initially sounds like a domain of parlor tricks becomes one’s personal reality and thereby loses its stigma. The magical becomes an ordinary part of life. Only in the past couple of years did I learn that such phenomenon are common knowledge among serious Buddhists, and they just commit to ignoring it, for the most part, in their pursuit of an awakened state of mind.
It makes sense that a discipline designed to magnify your awareness of your own awareness would reveal the overlaps between one conscious mind and another. When empathic and psychic perceptions become more apparent, as they inevitably do, the question is what to do about it. While Zen Buddhists ignore anomalous cognition, New Age adepts make it their playground.
Collective Samsara
One way to view the intersection between the psychic realm and the fundamental emptiness is that the psychic realm is simply an extension of the samsaric mind, one that spans multiple individuals. If each individual consciousness is privy to the consciousness of others, whether or not it sticks in memory, our imaginary mental worlds become a collective reality.
There is one serious implication. From a New Age perspective, the solution to problems in the psychic realm is psychic manipulation. Is your energy being drained? Cut the imaginary cords that tie you to the other person. Is someone attacking you? Mount an imaginary counterattack. We create imaginary boundaries, surrounding ourselves with shields and bubbles of imaginary material, which others will tend to respond to as real. We send light and receive light from point A to point B in order to help and love. We create all sorts of imaginary forms between us, all with the intentions of navigating our mutual imaginary world.
Often, all we are doing is bringing our individual neuroses and fundamental delusion into the collective. We are just listening in on one another’s inner world.
When confronted with something dark and fearful, the New Age perspective encourages us to put a wall around it, attack or appease it. In contrast, the Buddhist perspective is to recognize it as illusory. Where these perspectives overlap, confronting your demons involves recognizing the ways in which others reflect your own fears back to you.
Mutual Liberation
In Buddhism, liberation from samsara is sought not only for oneself but for all beings. The work we do with our minds benefits those “listening in.” If individual samsara, or the imaginary mental world we take as real, forms a more reified, shared, or collective inner world, then we must confront collective samsara in the same way we confront individual samsara.
This means that the path to mutual liberation requires transcendance of these mutual imaginary worlds.
To transcend a collective or shared imaginary world, you must do the opposite of what your sense of separate identity tells you. Most New Age tactics are predicated on being separate from others. Instead of “cutting cords,” for example, realize that there are no cords to cut, no ties and no lack of ties. Rather, the cords are imaginary. This does not mean that two people will not feel and respond as though a cord of energy connected them. It means that the cord is mutually imaginary. If you cut the cord, the other person will feel it. Ultimately, you will feel it too, because you are not two separate beings.
Something I have found extremely powerful is to approach issues that arise in my relationships with others as though they were happening between me, myself, and I. In other words, imagine that the behavior of others is a reflection of something within. It is easy to believe that what happens on the outside bears no relation to what happens on the inside, especially if you don’t like what you see, but try it again after altering a very basic assumption.
Stop assuming that the content of your mind is private. If you are dumbfounded when someone speaks ill of you, ask yourself how you speak to them in your imagination. Even if they are not aware of why they feel the way they do, they will respond to your words even though they were never spoken aloud.
Look in the Mirror
I have an image in my mind of what it is to exist in this reality. A man is standing in front of a vortex, representing the ordinary reality immediately in front of him. He sees the vague impression of another congealing in the vortex. That other has its back turned towards him, which makes him angry. He picks up a stone and throws it at the other. The stone soars into the vortex and about ten minutes later, the man feels a whack on the back of his head. What the? He looks down and finds at his feet the very same stone.
Of course, growing even more angry, he throws another stone and another, and each time, the same stones smack him in the skull. He cannot bring himself to admit the possibility that his injuries were his own doing, because the illusion of being a separate individual is so strong, so occluded by concepts of what it means to be human.
When your conscious awareness stretches out beyond you, how do you know where you end and “other” begins? The more you meditate, the clearer that image in the vortex will become. Eventually, every time you look at someone, you will see the back of your own head.
A swell depiction of karma:
How many times have I been hit in the back of the head then stand there all angry and dumbfounded, rubbing my skull, wondering, “Hey, who did that?” Then I throw another rock into the vortex. When the time lag grows shorter and shorter, which it does after a long-term meditation practice, the relationship between your actions and your reality becomes so evident, throwing stones becomes very difficult. Not because you’ve become any kind of saint! Because your head is hurting, and you can’t lift your arm without simultaneously cowaring.
Placing this in the New Age framework, when you “cut the cords” that tie you to someone, you cut off your own self and reify your perception of separation. When you put up a boundary or wall, you reify the perception that you are vulnerable and isolated.
In the end, you will produce the opposite of the intended effect. For this reason, we must move towards the monster in the nightmare rather than running away. Have you ever noticed that the more you flee a monster in your dreams, the scarier they become, and when you turn around and look them in the eye and really wonder who they are, they transform? This happens in our collective imaginary world as well.
The Places that Scare You
Some angels come into our lives not only to show us our light but to show us our demons. They give us the opportunity to look them in the eye. When else would we truly go to the places that scare us? Only in someone with whom we feel a deep sympatico, only in someone who opens out heart and draws us near, do we ever dare look into the eyes of our demons.
Confronting demons is important for opening your awareness, because the places that scare you represent aspects of the greater mind that you reject, and as long as you continue to resist and reject some aspect of your inner reality, you lose the opportunity to discover that it cannot really hurt you.
What are you afraid of? What scene can scarcely flash through your mind without sending you scurrying for a safe place far away? One way to determine what scares you is to ask yourself, what makes you cut someone off and get them as far away from you as possible? What do you quarantine?
Going Crazy
I quarantined myself. For me, my fear has always been the experience of such intense pain and suffering that I cannot cope, and the inability to cope turns me into a veritable mental patient. In my subconscious, being a mental patient means that your mind is no longer your own, its content has no validity, and you are essentially a worthless human being unable to contribute anything of value to society, just a painful burden.
Right now, the questions of perspicacity, sanity, and value to society all seem non-sensical. We are what we are. At this point, I think if I woke up and found that I really was emotionally broken, I would be fine with that. Er, well, I guess being fine with it would negate it, but isn’t that exactly what I’ve been learning? To confront and embrace my demon and thereby watch it disappear? How else could I walk into the dungeons of sorrow and call myself a healer?
Haunted
In the middle of writing this, I stopped and turned on the television to a scene in the show “Haunted,” which I never watch. It was an episode called “Seeking Asylum.” A detective named Frank becomes an undercover mental patient in order to solve a crime. That amused me. As a psychology PhD student, when I was in the hospital for overwhelming grief and fear, I felt like an undercover agent. Good thing I didn’t tell them that! Alas, I would still be there.
In the scene playing when the television came on, Frank was in an office looking at a work of art on the wall, a mandala of nails.
“A patient created it,” said the doctor.
“It’s very interesting,” said Frank.
“Out of nails which were removed from their own stomach.” He paused. “It’s all about transformation, Frank. Learning how to take something shameful and turn it into something beautiful.”
“Who made it?” he asked.
“A patient in Dr. Cardicott’s… the point is, you need to start learning how to tranform your demons.”
That got my attention, of course. (It turns out the doctor was the psychopathic murderer. I find that pleasantly ironic.)
Beyond State-Dependent Memory
I recently realized another good reason why I have felt a little crazy during the past year or so. Long-term meditation has one very pronounced side-effect. You develop an awareness that is two steps back from whatever your mind is doing in the moment, and you would be surprised just how massively the mind shifts from one perspective to another, or one mode or state or tone to another, even in one day. It’s like watching the seasons change from hour to hour.
I suspect that ordinarily, we move along with these shifts so completely, that we cannot compare the present perspective to the one we had two hours ago. Research on memory reveals that memory is highly state-dependent. If you are depressed, for example, you will have difficulty remembering past experiences or scenes that involve positive emotion. My belief is that a long-term meditation practice develops our state-independent memory.
Michael Murphy and Steven Donovan discuss some similar phenomena in chapter 3 of their book.
This can be extremely disconcerting, so I can see why state-dependent memory evolved as the norm. From whatever state or mode we enter, our particular perspective on the world and the concomitant feeling tone feels so real and valid that we do not see it as “a perspective.” Instead, we take it as direct perception. What we see is what exists “out there.” However, if you are able to watch how your global perspective shifts, how even the ambient lighting of the moment seems to change color, you begin to understand just how much of your “reality” is chosen and fabricated by your own imagination. Watching these shifts take place, it is hard not to have the distinct feeling that you are losing touch with “reality.” You are only losing touch with fabricated reality. For this reason, periods of confusion are common just before you hit the greatest clarity.
I used to describe it as a feeling of cycling among various perspectives, like a slideshow of personal realities. Once, during meditation, I had a waking dream in which I was standing at one end of a long road. At the other end of the road was a snake. At the upper end was a large, circular room covered with windows. Each window looked out across the same landscape, but each window offered a very different view, and a sentence ran through my mind: “There are many perspectives on the same thing.” Welcome to the collective consciousness.
Welcoming the Demons
I reference the story of Milarepa again and again. Milarepa was a Tibetan Buddhist saint who began life as a vengeful murderer. He reached enlightenment by retreating to a cave and confronting the various horrific demons that came to haunt him. Rather than fighting them off, he welcomed them into his presence and sincerely asked to know them. The moment he accepted them completely, they dissolved.
Just as there are angels in life who show us our demons, there are also seemingly “evil” people who show us our light. No one is evil. You might know this intellectually or philosophically then find yourself accusing someone of being a brainless witch. When cruelty and unkindness and lack of compassion reach a level of incomprehension, it’s easy to believe that there is no humanity behind it.
Earlier this week, I received numerous voice messages from my ex-husband’s mother. After a few missed calls, she had grown extremely angry. She believed that I was missing her calls on purpose and keeping her from speaking to my children. The mix ups fueled her villainous image of me and gave her ample reason to attack with full force. Her messages were so vile, I could not listen to them without shaking. She threatened to “take action” or “call child protective services.” To be honest, that would probably help me out, since my ex-husband is not fond of sending child support. “I know all about you!” she said. “I know what everyone says about you!” I do not even know what she was talking about, or who she meant by “everyone,” but it got under my skin. Alas, what happened to my blissful equanimity? My luminous objectivity? Conditioning. Ah well, now is now, and this is what is.
I went to bed swimming in her rage. In my mind’s eye, I saw an old woman with nothing but ill will in her heart and a total lack of understanding for the challenges of being a single mother.
But I had no doubt that her anger was a reflection of something within me.
I looked at her in my mind’s eye, and I opened to her rage. I took it into me. I said, “Your pain is my pain.” The moment I opened to her anger, the anger transformed into intense grief and sadness. She so misses her grandchildren, I thought, and she thinks I am evil. I opened to her grief. “Your pain is my pain,” I repeated. When I opened to the grief, the sadness transformed into love, or rather, this glowing, pleasant, open, throbbing warm feeling in my heart.
Then something very strange happened. My awareness exploded. It felt exactly as if the ceiling on my mind vanished and opened out into the night sky. My mind filled with visions. (I can’t believe I’m using that word, but it’s apt. I still think of myself as an athiest, an athiest being someone who refuses to believe what they cannot perceive.) I saw, very vividly, an image of the cosmos–stars and galaxies–and a giant serpent coiled around some long, invisible strand of something. The serpent moved up the strand like an earthworm. I saw kalaidoscopic images, particularly spinning vortices, sometimes two vortices layered one upon another spinning in opposite directions. In addition, I felt bolts of energy shooting through my body. My muscles became so tense that I could not keep my head on the pillow, and I shook. After that, I felt unbearable bliss and deep silence. It was bizarre. After I fell asleep, I had vivid dreams, including one lucid dream of a long slinky. A man showed me the slinky and asked that I peer down into the length of it to see the coils. The dreams and visions and surges of energy are not particular important, but they do represent an expansion of awareness. When you confront your demons, you awaken more and more to who you truly are, a mind far greater than the one you generally identify as “you.”
Rumi was right…
“Whoever finds love beneath hurt and grief
disappears into emptiness with a thousand new disguises.”
~ Rumi
Confrontation, Not Self-Torture
Another place that has scared me is when a lover who has taken on such life in my heart turns away from me emotionally and surrounds someone else with all their passion, excluding me from their world and ejecting me from their heart. It happened on the terrace last summer. It happened over and over again with the Buddhist neuroscientist, who valued devotion and lasting connection so deeply that I was compelled to remain privy to it.
And privy I was! I can sit on my meditation cushion and feel what he is doing, hear his thoughts, and even occassionally see clearly what he is seeing in that moment. He once spent hours staring at a computer simulation of the brain unfolding in three dimensions, and I was lying in bed a thousand miles away wondering what on earth I was looking at, this bizarre gray animation. We once had the exact same bizarre dream on the same night. In research on transcendant cognition, this phenomenon is sometimes called “entrainment.” We were highly entrained.
If he spends a day in meditation, even on the other side of the planet, I spend the day walking around in peaceful silence, wondering why my mind is so quiet, my heart so open, and my body so glowing with worship. If he spends an hour in utter panic, I lie on my couch shaking, my heart beating out of my chest, and wonder why on earth I feel such fear. There have been times when I knew, down to the minute, when he would arrive at my door or when he would call, and what he was planning to say. He once went on a retreat and met a long lost friend whose name resonated in my mind for days. I wanted to text him, “Who is Jane?” I found out later. I have a hundred such anecdotes. Because of him, I know that the random perceptions that arise in my mind often come from someone else, and I stopped worrying that I was losing my mind. I owe him a great debt.
And the connection is bidirectional. When a former love rebuffed me on the terrace in favor of his new female companion, and I drove home sobbing and hurting all over, my Buddhist love drove an hour outside of a retreat center deep in the forest on the east coast to get a cell signal and ask me if I was okay. He had been meditating and suddenly began crying, with thoughts of me and my former love popping into his mind.
But if he spends the night starting up with someone new, I see all of that too and find I cannot close my eyes or turn my head. In many a dream, I see him with others. I knew what his next lover would look like, sharing the dreams months ago, and now that has come to pass. The experience has been tormenting and slightly horrifying.
I spent the past year begging every guru I meet, from Buddhist teachers to Zen roshis to Tibetan monks, to tell me how to turn this off! They all tell me the same annoying thing. “It’s a gift!” What kind of gift is it to feel the grief from every funeral across the street from my house, to feel the rage of my ex-husband and his mother, to feel my lover’s heat in my body as he embraces someone else? What kind of gift is that?
Finally, I put real distance between us. Did I run away from the place that scared me? Did I abandon someone who promised never to abandon me? I would run into a burning barn for him, but if the searing of my flesh causes him to suffer, and it clearly has, self-sacrifice is no longer an act of love. Now, I love him by taking care of myself. Every time I wrap a warm blanket around my cold body, I am loving him. That does not feel figurative or poetic to me. It feels perfectly literal. In a very real sense, I put distance between us, and yet he is just as close to me as ever.
The Butterfly One
I wrote in A Boogie With Sole that I believe the love of those far away is manifested in our immediate surroundings.
Last week, after basking in deep gratitude for an angel in my life, someone so clearly sent from above that it’s almost comical (call this person Butterfly), I dreamed of someone I knew last year. I woke up abruptly in the middle of the night, my heart pounding, my eyes wide open, with the words of this woman still floating in the space above me as if they had just been spoken, “Did you know I was the Butterfly one?”
I replied, “Yes, of course I know.” How could I not know? I wish I could erase the events of the past, but I trust that things played out the way they were meant to play out.
We can, apparently, love from afar. There is no real distance between us.
In this way, it makes no more sense to run into the burning barn than it does to run away from it.
Confront your demons to discover their true nature, not to torture yourself.
A Dark Cloud
On Tuesday night, I went to bed early and woke up at about 11:30 p.m. with a dark cloud above me. Someone close to me was feeling profound pain and terror. I tried to feel into it and determine who it was and what the pain was about.
Someone very dear to me who had been suffering intensely. There was someone else. Maybe some part of me wrapped up in it. An image of me? Someone else’s image of me? I was reminded of my fears of being crazy. There is nothing like strong empathic perception or periods of inexplicable ecstasy to make you question your sanity (especially if you are a psychology student who knows which mental illnesses include them as symptoms). But I don’t worry about it anymore. And, when the mind and body are very still and clear, the perceptions are so clearly external that I don’t question their validity.
The cloud was pulling on me. When I sat against it, I felt the immense pain of it. When I gave to it, I felt joy and light and a palpable presence, but it never lasted long. The joy was soon replaced with fear. A lack of trust? It was all very weird. At a certain point, I realized that I did not want to give to it. I think there was something misdirected about it. Perhaps I was trying to provide something that was not supposed to come from me. I prayed to Quan Yin or some other powerful love consciousness in the cosmos to send light into the dark cloud, and soon, I felt relief and went back to sleep.
There are the places that scare us, and then there are the dark clouds in others begging us for light, flooding us with their pain in a plea for relief. There must be a difference between confronting your fears and giving what should be coming from somewhere else. Perhaps this is why we instinctively recoil when people turn us into objects of worship.
Use your intuition. Do what feels right. If you have love in your heart, you’ll know what to do. Distance is not about self-protection, because nothing can really harm you. Rather, distance is about allowing others to find the light that never leaves them. Then, not only do they find peace, you find it too.
Awakening Through Light
In the end, the point is not to magnify your suffering but to be free of it. The places that scare you are just reflections of your own fear and guilt. You can think of it as confrontation, or you can think of it as a practice of shining love into the dark corners. Bring your open heart into the scene, and watch the sun within you dissolve your worst nightmares. You don’t need a nightmare to compel you to wake up. Only love for the sun.
