It's the Fricken Demons, Again
My take on these tedious cyclical outbreaks, Newsletter, 20 May 2023
Another day and another round of demon hysteria has hit the TL. The local ortho-digital moral-integrity unit levelling their heavyweight intellectual capacities at taking down the evil edifice of meditation.
This is not uncommon on the twatter hell-site. It happens cyclically (amusingly) as fervent accounts vie for the top spot as the boring humans imaginable. This time, directing their vast powers of reason and taking aim at the activity of sitting and breathing. Known as "meditation" or “mindfulness”. This is a favourite target of the online fire and brimstone legions, albeit a rather strange one as we will see.
This latest round of pious buffoonery came at a good time because I will in fact be conjuring demons in no time flat, in a concentrated and intensive fashion. A few weeks raising hell itself with my Zen master. A well-known and delightfully devilish demonologist. I am grateful to have found such a person of fantastical concentrated malevolence, hell-bent on making life difficult for reformed hoes on Twitter.
Of course, only a few know that in meditative states one becomes a kind of relaxed Dr Faustus. Now everyone knows this, and I’m angry that this ortho-girl has blown my sinister cover. She took us down from the inside, dammit. We should have known better than to admit women to our ranks.
So I admit it. Demons circle in the mind when meditating, whispering plans for very, very naughty things indeed. Upon completing each sitting or Zazen session, participants gleefully rub their mitts together in anticipation of future acts of spite against the faithful. Ritually twirling our moustaches in anticipation of being released into an unsuspecting world, filled to the brim with ill intent.
Although I jest, one can indeed face and wrestle with inner demons. I think this is where this girl went with it, and she lost the match. Without good guidance, your garden variety loony can come out more unstable than when they went in. It is 10 hours of having to sit with yourself daily on intense retreat, for example. And having to keep your trap shut the entire time. It's little wonder there are so many stories on twatter of people having lost their marbles at such terrible impositions. Imagine being quiet.
The newly traditional female pfp in question that spurred this weeks wrathful clarification made the error of having her cretinous thoughts circulate into my mind space. She boringly related her dime-a-dozen story about being involved in "Eastern religious circles" for several years. After a decade of listless indiscipline and god knows what else, she realised with her immense intellectual capacity that meditation was in fact demonic.
Indeed it took her 10 years to realise this - according to her own story - and I can only assume in the interim, she enjoyed being furiously ravaged by demonic entities. That seems like a while to figure out that convening with the forces of darkness through Eastern Practices may harm your psychic health.
Undoubtedly, Eastern religion in the West attracts a heterogeneous mish-mash of contaminated riff-raff. I proudly count myself amongst their number. Ironically, it is probably true that this girl was also one such person. Highly unstable psychologically, searching for answers to her being prone to fits of hysteria and psychic flakiness. That's just a guess, but I've seen these types before very often. There's almost no psychological difference in their character structures and essential drives, even if the peculiar tastes are slightly different.
It's not untrue that some degree of pain drives most people to something like meditation or, more broadly, Eastern Religion. Difficulty in dealing with life or some sense of overarching dissatisfaction. I don't say this disparagingly; life can be a massive piece of shit, and in our weaker moments, we're rightly compelled to find answers (That is why technologies like meditation or yogas were created - more on this in the next newsletter).
I've found modern women quite prone to this kind of thing, utilising magical thinking and mysticism to explain things with disappointing and unflatteringly pedestrian causes. Causes they don't wish to face. Not to pick just on them exclusively; it's just what I've noticed in the last decade and it was a female that made the comment.
This is probably what drives non-Christians to Christianity also. This is what she's done. High anxiety types, trying to find some answers that attenuate their negative experience or life-feeling.
Absolutist moral values present themselves as great comforts to such people. It gives them something to hang onto whilst the tempest of their shifting intense internal states rages on unabated.
For this reason, converts very often look clownish. There’s no genuine cultural religiosity here, it’s used rather as an edifice covering up for something. This anxiety shows itself when these people gracefully embrace condemning people to damnation for doing the same things they once did. Apparently, nothing is more enjoyable than projecting their internal hang-ups on the external world in hilarious and bizarre ways.
From the point of view of making people less dumb or less insane, I believe religions, in general, are not well equipped to deal with this kind of peculiar Western psychological malaise.
And it's in this way that Eastern religions' "higher" or "esoteric" teachings get lost in the weeds. All sorts of psychological neurosis and brain noise desecrate high teachings. Methods and insights that have no relation to the personal hang-ups of a zealous converts. Or even the bad behaviour of prominent figures, as we have seen many times.
The essential realisations of something like Buddhism points to, goes far beyond the petty moralisms lobbed by hard-line religious hysterics online.
Or dirty, stinky hippies talking about love or whatever - it does work both ways.
Realisations in Buddhism are concretely referential to psychological states and realisations about the truth of human experience. They're not induced necessarily by ideas or reading but rather by self-investigation and changes in psycho-physiology induced by disciplined practice. This is why meditation, and the species of practices it refers to are used - because the only way to have an actual realisation is through literal self-reflection. Hacking the reactive human physiology, and mastering it. Seeing it in its true context.
This is no easy task, no one ever said it was. It was often kept away from your average mouth-breather for this reason.
When engaging with this work, times can get tricky. But the rewards are great. It requires that you work through a little discomfort…And, well, some people are real pussies and can’t handle a little adversity. Whenever you see someone invoke an explanation like it is all demonic, it's embarrassingly apparent they were enormously unsuccessful in their practice. That’s really what they’re telling you.
If she was practising at all - because most people just adopt clothes, language, thai Fishermans pants, yoga mats and vocabulary - the consumable material elements of Eastern Religions - very few people actually properly practice insight. And the ones that do aren't whinging online about demons.
When converting to Christianity of Orthodoxy, it really is the same thing. They have no real connection to the transcendent religious qualities of the doctrine itself. They are cut adrift, as it were. She, or they, come to it in the same way they came to Buddhism or Vedanta or whatever else; they want the spiritual accoutrements. Like a life accessory. And in her case, group acceptance for rabid displays of cheap morality.
Given that I'm going to Zazen Sesshin, I like to remind myself of the essential truths of what I'm engaging in. For my non-meditating or non-hippie readers, it's worth reading this, with the above context also in mind, because it clears up many of the doltish misapprehensions that you see circulating. It’s really nothing malevolent or diabolical.
Some of the best writers on the subject of meditation and the nature of realisation come from the Mahamudra tradition. One such luminary in this lineage or tradition is the famed Tibetan saint, Milarepa. I reproduce here an exquisite writing, which says all that ever needs to be said on the matter of meditation.
If you were to read nothing else at all on practice, having this in your pocket is quite literally all you would ever need to reference.
ILLUMINATING WISDOM
Homage to all the sacred masters.
When we talk about the characteristics of the Mahamudra of illuminating wisdom, we talk about three sections: ground Mahamudra, path Mahamudra, and fruition Mahamudra.
First, the ground Mahamudra - the essential nature of things, the mind of the Buddhas, the mind-essence of sentient beings -- does not exist as something that has colour or shape, a centre or edge. It is free from limitations and partiality and knows neither existence nor nonexistence.
It is neither confused nor liberated. It is not created by causes and is not changed by conditions. It is neither altered by the wisdom of the Buddhas nor spoiled by the obscurations of sentient beings. It is neither improved by realisation nor worsened by confusion.
Path Mahamudra is that which is to be practised within the ground Mahamudra as follows:
When settling, settle without conceptualising.
When remaining, remain without distraction.
When practising, practice without fixation.
When manifesting, let it manifest as dharmata.
When freed, practice it as natural freedom.
Beyond concepts, fruition Mahamudra is free from something that liberates, free from hope and fear. It is the exhaustion of concepts and phenomena; it is non-fixation, non-grasping, and it is free from utterance and description and is thus beyond concept.
Ground, path, and fruition are to be practised as one.
This elegant succinct text should show you that there isn't anywhere, ultimately, for naughty demons to be found. If they did show up, they would just be another shade of experience to be seen through, in a greater context of all impermanent phenomena.
This is not a description of ideology or some otherwordly spiritual realm; it is merely a pointing and instruction for simply seeing things as they are. That's it. As someone who has meditated a lot, this is very much a concrete description of the nature of our ultimate experience.
These words are not flowery appeals to morality or confusing Eastern obscurantisms. Once seen, even for a second, we are provided with a wonderful space to simply rest in the inconceivable incomprehensibility of whatever the hell all this is.
Looking forward to relating some experiences to you on my return.
Finally, please like, share and subscribe this article if you like it when I skewer people and rid the world of mind-numbing ignorance.
News:
Podcast out tomorrow. I had a few reds under my belt so a little worried I sounded more retarded than usual, Kevin assures me I was ok but I’m not so sure.
Sadly, people are obsessed with a 'higher order' out there that they think we have to be aligned with.
One day they'll realize that demons etc are internal and the evils of the world can be explained with looking into psychopathy and sociopathy.
No need for evil forces when they are incarnate.