Hardcore Zen_ Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality - Brad Warner [49]
Why?
There are traumas we’ve all carried around in our heads since before we were three years old. This deep, deep stuff is so abstract it’s almost impossible to really recognize it for what it is. Think about it. The traumas you suffered as a toddler were experienced by an entity very little like what you call your “self” today. Were these things to suddenly start to flood back into your consciousness, there’s no telling how your brain would end up interpreting them.
In my case, all this stuff and tons more came back up as deep, sourceless, desperate fear. Later on, the same kind of stuff popped back up as astounding dreams of fabulous wonders (more on that later).
The restrictions we place upon ourselves are the price we pay for having a civilization. There is no other way for civilization to exist. Yet we’ve reached a point in our own society where we can start to understand this phenomenon for what it is. Far from being the dangerous loosening of morals so many warn us about, this kind of thing is actually human society’s awakening to a new sense of real morality, a morality that is much more powerful than any which could be maintained through the fear of a God whose existence most of us question.
WHEN YOU DO ZAZEN, you are sitting in a state in which the mechanisms of psychological repression begin to become a little more fluid, a little less restrained. That’s when the demons are released from the caves we keep them in. Some people may find their repressed thoughts so alien that they take on abstract shapes or appear in the form of hallucinations, things literally experienced as “out there.”
One time I actually heard the song “Kashmir” by Led Zeppelin playing all the way through, just as if there were a radio next to me. I even looked around to see if someone had brought one into the room. The demons represented in ancient paintings or spoken of in legends are nothing more than stuff just like this. Those beautiful drawings in Tibetan Buddhist art are representations of all the things that distract a person from finding the truth. The problem is that so many folks get confused and think these kinds of depictions are of the truth itself.
On the final night of forty-nine days of zazen that led to his enlightenment, Gautama Buddha is said to have faced Mara, the king of the demons. When Mara confronted him with all sorts of horrors (and all sorts of delights), Buddha touched the ground as a symbolic gesture of grounding himself in reality. You often see him in this pose in statues, sitting in the lotus position with one hand touching the ground. The story is remarkably similar to that of Christ’s “last temptation” in the desert. Both stories are undoubtedly referring to the same psychological phenomenon.
Zen Buddhism speaks of makyo or “the world of demons.” Of course there really isn’t any actual realm that is the world of demons. But disturbing psychological states can seem so real that people react to them just as if they were absolutely real, and that is a problem.
Encounters with gods and demons, visits to heavenly realms and hellish ones—this stuff is fun to read about but not so relevant to people in modern Western society. These days people don’t see demons and gods as much as they used to. What the ancients called visions of gods and demons and visits to heavens or hells are what we now call hallucinations, manic states, depressive states—even psychosis.
Gods and demons are culturally bound. The Salem witch-hunts, it’s been theorized, were the result of several people becoming poisoned with ergot, a fungus containing the same chemical that was later synthesized and called LSD. These people believed their “visions” were the results of witchcraft. Innocent women were tortured and killed because these people did not have the understanding that certain chemicals can cause changes in the brain that can lead to the release of repressed psychological drives and can even lead to hallucinations. This