Article 62: Meeting the Devil

Article 62: Meeting the Devil Within

Who or what is the Devil? It would be interesting, no doubt, to study the history and origins of this Luciferian presence in Western culture, but that will not be done here. Suffice to say that it represents a demonic principle and in this Article that demon is the Enemy-Within. Even were one to meet a fully incarnated Devil tempting one at the mountaintop, as Jesus did after fasting in the desert for forty days, the temptation so summoned manifested in Jesus as temptation on his part and thus as an Enemy-Within. The night of the Buddha’s full and complete enlightenment, he encountered this same principle, first in the form of endless types of enemies threatening to hurt him with various weapons, then in the form of endless lovely maidens inviting him to enjoy every type of sumptuous sensual pleasure, then in the form of remembering all his past lives. In this way the tempting distractions of Selfhood in the form of Aggression, Passion and Ignorance paraded in his mind’s display, much like the seeming outer landscapes and situations we journey through in life, but he was unmoved by all, unswayed, not tempted; he let them go openly and willingly and thus full, complete, no longer hindered Enlightenment dawned and remained, shining, the rest of his life in this body and world, wandering and teaching for about fifty years thereafter.

If the devil-demon is fixation on Selfhood, how does it manifest in daily life? Well, I don’t want to treat this in a ‘let me count the ways’ fashion because that would take volumes, not a page or two. Let’s put it this way: there is always a choice between looking at the world through the eyes of the Self, the soul of I-Me-Mine, or looking at the Self through the eyes of the World Soul. The Self is like a yo-yo which, although it flies free and spins for a while gloriously, must always return to the hand of its master. It is attached. And indeed such attachment is the prime temptation principle. It manifests in no end of ways as some sort of sticky, self-referential and turgid quality connected with appetite and its imagined satisfaction. It’s not that appetite is bad – who doesn’t enjoy a good meal or great sex? – rather the stickiness, the fixation, the attachment. In the Four Dharmas of Noble Persons (usually translated as The Four Noble Truths) the second Dharma is the Cause of Suffering which is this same attachment, stickiness, fixation. We don’t just look at and appreciate a flower, we want to possess it, capture it, consume it.

One classic way this happens in the human realm is the attraction between the sexes, for example in the way a man perceives a woman. The other day I was driving home in my small town proceeding up the hill towards our home and spied a young, pretty girl walking down in the opposite direction. I only glimpsed her for a few fleeting seconds between other cars in traffic but it was enough time to notice two distinct aspects of the experience: the first being instant pleasure in witnessing her beauty. The human female is proof that there is a God. (Buddhists usually don’t talk this way, but maybe Celtic Buddhists do!). So first there is the raw, naked appreciation of her beauty; then came a tug, a little fixation, a little desire to have more than just the vision of beauty shining in mind, a yearning for contact. That tug, that attraction towards having more, that is the Devil, that is the hand to which the yo-yo of experience is continuously attached. No matter what experience arises, it always has to report back to the personal Central Intelligence Agency of Me that wants to know all, see all, feel all, keep track of all and, ultimately, control all. That is the Demon.

So that’s it, basically, on this example. No need to stretch it out further. There is a flash of appreciation, of awareness, of direct experience and then the impulse to possess, interpret, catalogue, freeze or control it and that secondary, supplementary fixation principle is the Demon, the Devil, the Enemy-Within. Now of course there are other aspects to the Enemy-Within principle, especially cowardice and laziness, but passion, being such a core drive in us humans, is the most easy to grok viz this twin-arising aspect. It is not the basic appreciation which is the problem but the fixation which segues into lust. I imagine all attractive young ladies quickly learn the difference between being appreciated and being treated as a prized, exclusive possession.

Consider the good-evil up-down higher-lower light-dark contrast in this depiction of Jesus meeting his Devil. They mutually both define and complement each other – a classic yin-yang dynamic.

One of the more esoteric translations of Yi (as in the Yi Jing / I Ching) is Coemergence or Coemergent Wisdom [see Daniel Hessey’s: Enlightened Society Yijing]. In this context we are noting the coemergence of both open perception and attachment-fixation, usually referred to as ‘wisdom and confusion.’ I described them above as first one then the other, because it is hard to describe both at the same time, but really the two aspects co-arise. And the interesting twist is that the open side, so to speak, can witness the sticky side and in so doing pop its bubble. Stickiness is the yin to openness’s yang; temptation is the yin to letting go’s yang. If you lurch to the left onto your left foot putting all your weight into your left leg, then the next step ends up with all the weight going into the right foot and leg. If your mind is filled with sticky lust at the mere sight of an attractive member of the opposite sex, the next step can be letting go of the stickiness to go back to fresh openness. This happens naturally when we enjoy a decent sense of humour for indeed most of what we find funny is some sort of stickiness-fixation principle being exposed, called out. Our pompous self-importance parading down the street all high and mighty Oliver is called-out by the humble banana peel causing him to land ignominiously on his arse with Hardy unable to stop snickering and then breaking out in laughter. The moment of coemergence – pomposity and its popping – happens not when he slips on the banana peel but precisely when his arse hits the pavement and his face registers surprise and embarrassment! (That’s coemergence for ya!)

The difference between a Buddha and a confused sentient being is simply that the Buddha sees clearly and completely the nature of confusion. [unattributed]

There is a similar dynamic perhaps with the awareness or state of goodness versus evil in that goodness can kindly look upon the confusion and suffering involved with those victims or perpetrators of evil understanding its nature and effects whereas generally evil cannot understand the nature and effects of goodness, they have closed themselves off to it. That grip of temptation, of fixation, is a type of closing down in that it rejects any state of openness having decided on what it wants and then fixating upon it. Obviously, this is the process involved in any sort of obsession. So spaciousness can see its opposite but claustrophobic intensity cannot see spaciousness, indeed letting go of holding on and merging into spaciousness might feel threatening making one hold on tighter. (Which is how one can end up trapped forever in hell with no way out.)

Sebastiao Salgado, one of this age’s most dedicated artists, spent years travelling all over the world photographing people and nature. At some point in the 1990’s he went on two separate trips to Rwanda and witnessed the enormous human tragedy unfolding there, the extraordinary loss of life with appalling suffering. He was deeply affected and in the movie about him I watched recently by Wim Wenders called ‘The Salt of the Earth’ he states that after witnessing so much horror for so long he lost faith in human nature and became profoundly dispirited. Later, as happened so often in his life, his beloved wife helped him find a way forward. He returned to Brazil, their homeland, where his wife came up with the notion of planting trees on his 600 hectare family estate which had completely dried up and become barren after too many years of farming too many cattle, presumably following standard procedures advocated by governments and experts. Over the next few years they planted millions of trees; after the first year, most of them died but each year a higher percentage survived so that after twenty years not only were there over twenty million flourishing trees, but also the land’s vitality had been restored with both rivers and wildlife having fully returned. In many ways a veritable miracle though of course we see such miracles nearly every where we go in this our marvelous world with its miraculous skies, terrains, living organisms, plants and creatures, including ourselves. His next book, Genesis, ranged all over the world to find unspoiled lands and peoples reflecting the virgin state of nature. I am eagerly expecting delivery in the next few days despite the cost of these large format photographic volumes,

What the Salgados did with their family property is admirably noble and generous. And, interestingly, it was prompted by having witnessed extreme suffering which arose principally out of extremely evil leadership which forcibly moved millions from one zone to another without any care for their survival – and of course most didn’t. Not to mention outright massacres of millions chopped into pieces by machetes and machine guns. Salgado’s spirit was almost broken, but thanks to his loving wife and connection with land, with plants, with people, with living creatures, he turned that extreme low arising from an encounter with extreme evil into something both glorious and natural. He restored his family’s part of the world back into wholeness. This is a grand, noble example of the left foot right food dynamic of the continuous interrelationship of so-called ‘good’ and so-called ‘evil.’

Sebastiao Salgado is a World Living Treasure, a true Noble One, a Bodhisattva in manifestation if not creed. No doubt somewhere the Buddha is very proud of him, of his demonstrated wisdom and compassion born from truly feeling suffering and the depths to which the Demon within us all can bring us if left unchecked, but also how that same Demon, when seen clearly, can bring out the best in us. Yin and yang, yin and yang…

Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.

John Stuart Mill during an inaugural address at the University of St. Andrews

Or as my Irish-American Grandmother used to love saying, wagging finger and all:

TELL THE TRUTH AND SHAME THAT DEVIL!!