Dealing with Demons in Difficult Times

Imagined or real, inner or outer, demons are entities that cause emotional, physical and mental distress, as well as being obstacles to spiritual growth. However unpleasant, encounters with our demons can also be marvelous occasions for deep inner work. As you may have noticed during the current pandemic, demons are magnified in difficult times. Fear, anxiety, anger, sadness, and depression are some of the major demons being triggered now, but restlessness, boredom, irritability, and the inability to concentrate have also become more visible. Not only have our demons been amplified by the novel coronavirus, but so are our automatic reactions to them. Binge eating, drinking, shopping, video watching, Internet browsing, are but a few of the addictive behaviors present in “normal” times that may increasingly occupy our attention now.  As you well know, these behaviors are short-term fixes of limited effectiveness. In this blog, I want to share practices with you that have helped me to deal more skillfully and effectively with my owndemons.  I hope you will benefit from these practices as well.

Fear is the biggest demon because physical death is the ultimate threat to everyone’s personal story line. Fear is a rather nasty demon, but it has been present in the human brain for millennia as a survival mechanism. Those who practice social distancing, wear masks, wash their hands frequently, and take other precautions, are adequately responding to the message of the fear demon now. For others, the consequences of having Covid 19 are just an incomprehensible abstraction. As it activates triggers in one’s personal story line, the fear demon can become very difficult to manage even for those who strictly adhere to the cautionary guidelines. Here I can speak from my own experience.  

My parents and their parents fled Russia in the early 20^th century to escape the pogroms against the Jews. Fear and its overtones in paranoia, anxiety, anger and melancholia are deeply ingrained in my family history. Even paranoids have real enemies: after all, there were people who really wanted to kill my family.  My parents carried their fear demons into the new world.  In the relative security of America, they still did not feel safe and this was not altogether imagined. They lived a hand-to- mouth existence in the Depression and in the late thirties and early forties there were Nazi rallies in their neighborhood in New York City. Overcome by her demons, my grandmother committed suicide before I was born. 

My mother’s demons were a compounded by the fact that she had three miscarriages before I came in into this world abruptly through a Cesarean section.  I was ejected into the world of samsara before I was quite ready!  Much later, in psychotherapy I actually went back to my experience of being in her womb and felt her extreme nervousness. As I grew up, the slightest physical disturbance was a source of acute worry for her and this worry was passed on to me. At 21, I finally came down with a very serious real illness, a chronic inflammation of the intestines known as Crohn’s disease. It is rather telling that recent scientific studies have shown that Crohn’s is prevalent among Jews with a family background in Northern Europe and Russia. It is safe to say that Crohn’s is a hereditary physical manifestation of the fear and anxiety demon.

Over the years, it has taken five major surgeries to heal my Crohn’s disease and I still have to be very wary of foods that might cause intestinal blockages.  Even a fairly minor intestinal malady can be a prelude to a hospitalization requiring a nasal gastric tube or further surgery.  In the face of Crohn’s, it is not surprising that I turned to meditation to manage my fear and anxiety demons. Meditation practice over many decades has increasingly helped me, especially when I almost died of septic shock in Nepal at the age of 60, and again last year when I had a heart attack. Of course, there have been occasions when demons got the best of me.  Rather than eating the bear, the bear ate me. Beating myself up about this goes only so far in being a corrective, because I tend to be hard on myself anyway.  Failure is part of being human.  I have learned that tolerance for my own failures in dealing with my demons extends to others who fail as well. And my failures themselves have also been very instructive. I keep a daily record of when “the bear eats me” and describe the circumstances. The Sufis say, “Straying marks the path.” Keeping a record helps me to make progress in dealing with my demons without being too hard or easy on myself.  As Samuel Beckett exclaims, “Ever Tried. Ever Failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” 

What matters most in facing the demons, is facing them head on.  Rudi called this “conscious suffering.” Otherwise, the demons will slowly hemorrhage your energy and with it your well being. This is the raison d’etre of the Buddhist Chod practice that many of you are familiar with. The first stage of the Buddhist Chod is checking in to see what is going on in your mental, emotional and physical bodies in response to the question, “What demon is coming up now that I should work with?”  Any disturbance is then registered as a demon. The awfulness and size of the demon is commensurate with its power. Then you ask it what it needs, rather than what it wants. The demon is part of yourself, voicing something you need to hear, and should be welcomed. For example, the shopping demon wants you to buy more things, but it may reallyneed you to do something to alleviate the underlying cause of your restlessness or boredom. This could be accomplished by just going for a walk in nature, a much more skillful undertaking than filling a closet with junk that is no longer amusing.  To deal with the demon of shopping—or the demon of fear for that matter—it has to be embraced and listened to. Then it will let go, or you will let it go.  For the present, it will be gone, although it cannot ever be completely extinguished, particularly in times of stress.  

There is a Buddhist practice of holding the demon like a baby and trying to soothe it by regulating your breath to a slow inhalation and exhalation.  The demon is regarded as your inner child crying out; it does not want to be ignored. 

From the standpoint of Kundalini practice, demons are simply concentrations of energy or disturbances of the energy continuum, accompanied by physical sensations. Feeling this disturbance fully, taking a deep breath and then beginning the double-breathing exercise with a conscious act of surrender, will help you to let go of the demon, change the channel, and expand the subtle body into the Void body where it burns and dissolves.  This practice may require many repetitions over an extended period of time depending on the intensity of the demon. This is true of the other practices of “demon management” as well.

Rudi was a spiritual giant who could “eat” almost all demons including yours. For the most part he treated both negative or even positive conditions equally, everything and anything was an occasion for inner work. Although he did not particularly like baseball or football, he would go to games if invited and just use all the wild energy of the screaming audience to augment his own shakti. He was fond of saying, “The only thing that is real is your ability to transcend the situation.” Essentially, even the most solid and seemingly impenetrable demon is just a manifestation of frozen energy. The fire of “kundalini dissolves the situation like snow on a hot pavement unless you are too lazy or stupid to do it, ” he would exclaim.

For all of us lesser mortals who do not have Rudi’s ferocious will, stamina, and consummate ability to overcome the depredations of the little self’s storyline through Kundalini practice alone, the Dzogchen method of cutting through the story line with the awareness of awareness,  in conjunction with grounding it in the subtle and physical bodies in Kundalini meditation,  may be the remedy for demon encounters.  Chod practice may also help.

By expanding into the infinite space of awareness in Dzogchen practice, the demon gets diluted; it moves from foreground to background. Dropping a bottle of even the strongest poison into the ocean will nullify its most harmful effects. The poison will still be present in some way but it has become only a small part of the ocean’s great depth. Dzogchen practice enables you to expand into the infinite ocean of awareness instantly and effortlessly, although for meditation beginners the awareness of awareness is often much more difficult to maintain as it needs to be properly grounded in the subtle and physical bodies. In Tibetan Dzogchen, getting to the awareness of awareness through using the technique of 360-degree soft focus attention short circuits the conceptual mind with its storyline that holds fear and other demons. The personal story line actually dies. This is a taste of what will happen when you actually die. For Tibetan Buddhists and Hindus, non-personal awareness remains and may reincarnate in another physical form.  The fear demon withdraws and suffering will be minimized if you manage to get out of the way when your storyline is about to end. In fact, letting go of the storyline in meditation is a practice of dying.  As far as I am concerned, it will be a relief not to be Mark Levy—a bit player in the human drama—anymore, and go on a new big adventure when the time comes.

In Dzogchen, cutting through of the story line is called Trekcho. In the classic Dzogchen texts, there are actually 21 of these immediate cutting- through techniques, called Semdzins.  In a future blog I will talk about several of those which I also find effective. Togal—resting in the spontaneous presence of space dancing itself— or literally, “dwelling in the Void body or Rigpa,” is the second phase of Dzogchen practice.  This is the one-two punch of dealing with demons, but the second punch demands the ability to let go and relax, acquired over years of meditation for the best results. Paradoxically, the second phase of the punch, Togal is one of infinite softness

In order to deal with demons, we have to recognize them.  This is easier said than done.  Fear, anxiety, anger, and sadness are the easiest to recognize because they are so noticeable. For the others such as boredom, irritability, lassitude, restlessness and so forth, which can be equally pernicious, continual self-checks are in order. Asking the question, “What is this?” many times a day is a Buddhist technique for gauging your internal weather. The sooner work with the demon begins, the lesser the possibility of the demon getting out of hand.  Sometimes it takes getting involved in an automatic behavior to realize that the demon is playing you.  Eating a pint or more of Haagen Daz ice cream at one sitting is a sign that a demon has taken over. Checking the news four times a day is another.  Buying an unnecessary toy is an all-too-easy escape mechanism in consumer societies. No object, situation, or romantic relationship, however spectacular, will give the demon what it needs to go away. People are trapped in endless cycles of dissatisfaction because they don’t understand the true causes of their grasping. Not only are they far from experiencing the state of “nothing missing” in deep meditation, but they continually postpone the real work that demons require. There is nothing wrong with conventional pleasures as long as they don’t hurt anyone including yourself, but you can’t expect too much from them. Sometimes you just need some fun or at least downtime from working with demons.  Even Rudi, who was more conscious of his demons and more motivated to work with them than anyone else I have known, would allow himself some slack in choosing to work with them. He would take an afternoon stroll and buy himself a New York hotdog slathered in mustard and sauerkraut or purchase another orange tee shirt (orange being the color of swami’s robes) to add to his huge collection. Aama Bombo, a very powerful Nepalese shaman who specialized in working with demons, enjoyed watching T.V. wrestling on breaks during long healing sessions when she stayed at my house in Oakland. 

The technical methodologies for dealing with demons in the Eastern traditions that I’ve described can become interesting exercises in personal creativity if the right aesthetic distance is attained and maintained, as Rudi and Aama have shown by example.  Working with demons successfully means handling them with great dexterity and finesse over a lifetime.