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Visions and auditory hallucinations, whether you’re seeing four-armed buddhas doing the Hippy Hippy Shake or hearing talking wallabees tell you to buy an AK-47 and wipe out the office are signs of faulty processes within the brain. Nothing more. I’ve never exactly understood why, for example, people who hear disembodied voices seem to be inclined to do what those voices tell them. If some stranger sat down beside you on a bus and said you should break into the White House and fondle the president’s dog, would you do it? Would you even consider it? Why are disembodied voices any more trustworthy? If a disembodied voice ever told me something like that, I’d tell him to go find a body and go screw himself.

Apart from my “Kashmir” moment, I’ve never actually hallucinated as a result of zazen. Most people these days don’t. What’s more likely to happen to you if you’re fairly stable is that all the junk you’ve suppressed all your life will start bubbling up to the surface in a far subtler way.

All that suppressed stuff has gotten reshaped, twisted, and remolded by conscious and unconscious processes for decades. And what’s worse is that you’ve given the name “me” to the result of twisting all this crap around in your brain all these years. You have to recognize that that “me” includes a lot of things that you find really disgusting and awful. You can’t be truly balanced until you come to terms with this. Most people are able to successfully repress the really awful stuff at least to the point where they won’t actually act it out, but pretending you don’t have such urges doesn’t really resolve anything on its root level. It’s just denial of reality.

And neither zazen nor Buddhism is about denying reality; they’re about seeing it clearly.

Recognizing your suppressed desires certainly does not mean you have to act on them. But you have to know that they’re there. Pretending only abnormal people have certain desires is extremely unhealthy and extremely dangerous.

Here’s why: A person discovers he has a desire that society likes to pretend exists only in truly sick and demented people. He comes to believe this desire is unique to him or at least to a very select and special group of people to which he belongs. He has every reason to believe this because society as a whole, made up as it is of people who cannot face up to the very existence of their own worst desires, tells him over and over again that this is the case. Our unbalanced friend begins to think that he must act upon this unique desire in order to express his own unique, “true” self. We all believe the urges that appear in our minds are somehow our “true” personality, our “real” self, and must therefore be satisfied in order for us to be really happy. Our crazy friend remains blissfully unaware, as society remains steadfastly in denial, that such desires are anything but unique. They are a universal.

Every one of us is Charles Manson, Saddam Hussein, and Adolf Hitler.

When your antisocial urges come to the surface you can feel, as I did, that it’s evidence you’re not a good person. You think you’re just pretending to be good, fooling everyone when really you have all these terrible urges. Since the terrible urges are part of your mind, you think they must be part of “you,” that they are in fact “the real you” and that the nice, normal “you” society knows is just a farce. But that’s really, really not it. At all. Everyone everywhere has urges like you do. The best among us are those who see this the most clearly. You can only do good when you know what bad really is and where it comes from.

The biggest, ugliest, most damaging lie that religions spread is that truly moral people never have immoral thoughts. What a dangerous, damaging load of crap. It’s not that a “good person” has only moral thoughts. It’s that they act only upon the moral thoughts and not the immoral ones. Lust in your heart is not the same as adultery. Only adultery is adultery. Lust in your heart is something no one can ever, ever avoid. People who pretend they have no impure