Delta 7851, Seoul → Atlanta, Apr 2022

The use of the word “demon” often implies evil, which in turn implies the dichotomy of “good” and “evil” as a trait self-existent in a being, when really it is a temporal, relational trait.

Relational in the sense that it is associated with an action between two beings. Temporal in the sense that it is associated with the moment of time when the action takes place. The classic example that one of my Buddhist teachers used was–to Hitler’s mom, was he evil? If not, then “evil” is a trait associated with the actions Hitler took to orchestrate the holocaust, not a trait self-existent in Hitler, the being himself.

An action is good or evil or more correctly, somewhere in between. Even more correctly, an action simply defines its consequence. One could re-imagine this without the judgmental label of good or evil, which, in my view, is a product of the ignorant human mind. This is the essence of the Law of Karma.

Every entity, human or not, is working to reduce its suffering. It is working towards its liberation, whether it knows it or not.

The human heart has the capacity to know this fully, to feel this Truth deeply, and to align the human self with collective liberation, which is the natural direction of evolution of the Universe, the Flow. By recognizing the access to this Truth deep within one's heart, one can live in Alignment with the Flow. When one is in alignment with the Flow, there comes an ease to one’s actions.

The choice is at once conscious and in flow. Conscious choice is not tedious as the label might imply for some. It flows.

In recognizing the paradoxical idea of the flow of conscious choice, we resolve the question of free will. The freest of wills is one that is in deep alignment with the Flow of the Universe, and feels absent, as if one was, but, a puppet in the unfolding of a Divine Play.

India, Dec 2024

The Buddha recognized this. Thankfully, the folks who developed mechanisms to work with UBs in IFS also recognize this.

I experienced an IFS unburdening session a few weeks ago–which is a euphemistic rebranding for a demonic spirit exorcism.

For a year or so prior to that, I had begun connecting to what I labelled as “the misanthrope within me”.

It seemed like there was a part of me that carried immense hatred and loathing of all human beings. For a while, I justified it as a consequence of deep trauma and just allowed myself space to be with it when it arose and not act upon what it suggested.

That’d get a bit tricky because this part would have impulses to laugh and mock other people when they were expressing their trauma. In my exploration of humiliation kink in consensual D/s containers, this was a gift. In regular day-to-day conversations, this meant it’d take a lot for me to hold loving presence when someone was sharing something deeply heartfelt and painful with me.

For a while I confused this part with my access to the Dark Feminine–which I confused with the witchy tendency to laugh out loud at misery. I was wrong. This was just a spirit being that had infected my being very early on in childhood.

It’s so wild to write these words out. For good reason, IFS was very careful about keeping all the work concerning UBs under wraps. It’d be introduced secretly only to IFS Level 3 practitioners because they were afraid of being discarded by academic, mainstream psychology.

I’m grateful that’s not the case anymore. I’m grateful that I was exposed sufficiently enough to literature about UBs in IFS–and that such literature existed!–to be able to conclude the existence of a UB in my system and find someone who could help me expel it (the author of the aforementioned literature, Bob Falconer).

I’m not sure if it’s fully gone. By the end of the session, as it was floating away in a ball of light (if this doesn’t make sense to you but you are intrigued, read the book “The Others in Us”), I felt it hook into my throat, right near my Adam’s apple. For a few days, after that I felt it floating above me, far above, but still hooked to my throat. I can’t feel its presence any more, so it’s possible that it has moved on.

A few years ago, a dear friend of mine asked me what “spiritual work” meant to me. I gave him the kind of “clean” answer that you’d expect from a millenial who identifies as “spiritual, but not religious” and only opts for “evidence-based, scientifically approved meditative practices”–”It’s a journey of introspecting and seeing behavior patterns within oneself”. In some ways, it’s a very correct answer. But now, “spiritual work” has taken on a whole new meaning for me. It means being able to connect with and help spirits find their right place, out of human bodies where they’ve parasitically attached themselves, causing suffering to the human & (unknowingly) to their own selves.

I honestly don’t even know where to begin on this journey but I’m fairly certain that childhood rape is a very common entry point for spirit infestations–a belief held independently by Bob Falconer. It’s very likely that this spirit, that I ejected, entered me at the time that my consciousness drifted out fully at that first moment of sodomy. I wonder if it came from my grandfather or if it was just hanging around waiting for a body filled with light (as children’s bodies are) to leech upon. The latter seems likely based on my intellectual understanding of the Bardo state of being described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead–where after death, the spirit of a body leaves it and floats around looking for copulating couples to inject itself into the body of the woman to be born as a baby. I imagine that in situations where the creation of a baby isn’t possible, the spirit instead gets lodged into the receiving being as an infestation. Brings a whole new meaning (for me) to the common religious exhortation of “sex should only be for procreation”. Whether male or female, we all have energetic wombs. I believe the infested spirits lodge inside these wombs. And apropos to what I described earlier about seeing the suffering of demons, the best way to deal with spirits that infest you is to treat it like a fetus in your womb and nourish it with love so that at some point, it may be released from you like a baby is from its mother. Because that’s what it came into you for, to be reborn as a baby. Because it saw two people having sex and went “hey! that’s my chance to get access to a human body again!”. Needless to say, these are unproved hypotheses based on direct exploration and intellectual digestion of my spiritual journey, deeply influenced by Buddhism

At the ISTA in New Delhi, I was entranced by a woman at one of the Temple nights. I had spoken briefly with her before–she was Dutch–and observed her at lunch one time, leaning back into her chair and really savoring the sunlight while people around her were chattering about idly like humans tend to do. Asking idle questions of each other instead of just breathing in silence together. The Buddha had an enviable skill of declining questions that he believed would not aid in the release of suffering of the asking person. I don’t know how he did that. I find it extremely difficult to say “No” to a question asked of me especially when the question is asked to me particularly because the human is looking up to me for an answer, while I have an inner sense that actually it’s not the answer they are looking for. I suppose some of this inner sense was muddied a bit with a base level of misanthropy that the UB had brought into my system. I’m curious to see how this changes moving forward.

Back to the Dutch lady. I witnessed her doing a dance on the floor. She seemed from beyond the human realm to my perception. ISTA often opens up shamanic perceptive portals so this isn’t unheard of, but still magical whenever it does happen. There was something about her dance that still lives on strongly etched into my memory. This is the (arguably wild) meaning that I make of what I was perceiving. Light was shining all around her and with every move, every swish of her hands, she was gently picking off spirit beings dangling off her energetic body. Tenderly picking them off and releasing them unto the light. An energetic cleanse of sorts. I was hypnotized.

What is it with me and these Dutch women? On the flight back from Mumbai to Asheville, I was sitting next to a guy from the Dutch army on the Amsterdam→Atlanta leg of the journey. I jokingly told him that he has probably met the only guy in the world who finds the Dutch accent incredibly adorable–not particularly known for topping the lists of “Cutest Accents in the World”. Funny what love can do.

My idea of ASMR is a Dutch woman repeatedly saying “der”. Or an Italian woman saying “Come si chiama?”. Either works.