Siddhartha and the demon

Cover of Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment

In his book, “Buddha: a story of enlightenment”, Deepak Chopra describes an incident when Siddhartha comes face to face with the demon Mara. The demon circles Siddhartha’s mind, trying to find a weakness, a crack through which he may enter and control the young prince. But Siddhartha finds a space of peace in his mind. He learns something about demons, the mythological symbols for fear, greed, and suffering. Siddhartha learns that “demons enter the mind when we resist them. The stronger our efforts to fortify ourselves against temptation, the stronger temptation has us in its grip.” (page 95)

This is the same lesson that Jesus taught when he instructed us to “turn the other cheek” and "resist not evil" (Matthew 5:38-39). It is also a basic principle of Vipassana meditation that one should be aware of all the physical sensations of the body, while remaining equanimous towards them. This is also the basis of the practice of forgiveness as taught by A Course in Miracles. If you do not resist that which disturbs you, it ceases to hold power over you. You no longer invest energy in it, and so it dissolves naturally.

A Course in Miracles explains this in psychological principles. It states that the world as you see it is a projection. Therefore, to attack anything that you perceive, whether it is an image you see outside yourself, or a thought or experience inside your mind, is to attack yourself. As long as you believe in attack and resistance, you will create suffering for yourself.

Buddha talks about the Dharma, the natural law. The way the universe and the mind work. The Hebrew tradition similarly uses the word Torah, also translated as law. What both these concepts hint at is the idea that there is a certain machinery to the mind. There are natural laws which produce inevitable results. If you try to punch your fist through a wall, it will hurt. If you try to break the laws of mind, you will suffer.

None of this has anything to do with divine retribution. It is simply the way nature works. If you live a life of attack you will suffer simply because you are creating suffering for yourself.

It has long been my belief that any truth which can claim the title of truth must be universal. In this sense I am a comparative religious scholar. If you have many wise people from different traditions, the truth will be the space where their teachings are identical. The more one studies different systems, the more you realise that, while the teachers used different metaphors, they almost invariably gave the same practical instructions. Those who think there are big differences between Christianity and Buddhism are only correct at the level of theory. At the practical level, however, they often share remarkable similarities, especially when one returns to the core teachings of the original founders, and not those of disciples or later teachers.

If we are looking for a universal system of practice, a universal spirituality, then we can find it. The tools are out there. The basic principles of harmlessness, of nonviolence, of forgiveness, defencelessness, love, peace, tolerance – these are all there. All that is required is that we release our individual mythologies that so often cause division, and embrace each other as brothers and sisters based on these universal principles.

We are mythologizing creatures that believe in difference and separation. I think it is about time that we let such childish things go and find our common humanity, our common ability to be spiritual in the true, practical sense of the word. We need people who are willing to live a spiritual life, not spend their time arguing about spiritual theories that hardly deserve the name.

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The new F-word?

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I recently saw a book in the bookshop called “Fuck it: the ultimate spiritual way”. My first reaction was that the author was encapsulating the Buddhist idea of “letting go” within a western framework. The more I thought about it, however, the more I realised that there were important differences between letting go in the spiritual sense, and the idea of saying “Fuck it” to things.

This letting go is what A Course in Miracles calls forgiveness, and Gary Renard jokingly refers to as "the new F-word". So what is the difference between these approaches?

The first important difference lies in making the apparent problems in the world real. To say fuck it to something means that you believe the problem really does exist out there in the world. What you are doing is attacking the problem, but declaring that you won’t do anything to solve it.

When you choose to forgive something, on the other hand, you recognise that the error that you see outside yourself is merely a mistake, and does not require direct intervention on your part simply because it has no real power to harm you or anyone else. The difference is important, even though your actions in the physical world may appear to be the same. The difference lies in the way you feel. If you have forgiven something, you have achieved a level of inner peace about it. It no longer troubles you. To say fuck it to something, however, is to hold on to the anger, judgement, and attack about it.

It should be clear to anyone who is serious about inner peace that holding on to attack and guilt in any form is extremely disruptive. It is the root of all psychological suffering. Worse, by repressing your anger about the situation in this way, you will most likely fall into a state of depression. You are trying not to care about something that you do, in fact, deeply care about. This is only possible if you suppress your feelings. But by suppressing your feelings you are also suppressing your love, your carefreeness, and your creativity. This is the complete opposite of achieving inner peace. Inner peace can only come from complete psychological freedom. And psychological freedom can only exist in the absence of repression of any kind.

In other words, to be truly happy and peaceful, you must not suppress anything. In order for this to be possible, you must let all your belief in the value of attack, anger, and guilt go. It is natural for you to try to get rid of those things, but you cannot do so by bundling them into the box of the unconscious, because by doing so you are actually holding on to them, and they will resurface at the first opportunity.

So while I understand the author’s intention, I do not think his approach goes far enough. Instead of saying “fuck it” to the world you see, I suggest you say “forgive it”.

This might not agree with our western mindset that often favors strong individualistic solutions and self importance. It’s cool to say “fuck it” to things. It gives you a sense of importance, power, and superiority. But in the end, it simply will not work. It’s time to let your ego go, stop fighting the dreams you have made, and say “forgive it” instead.

Forgiveness *is* the ultimate spiritual way.

In Peace

Igacim

(The School for Inner Peace)

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