In the Ayahuasca ceremony where I successfully recovered repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, I expelled (exorcised) a spirit that had been lodged in my wounds for decades. Prior to this expulsion, my French-American, Jewish Shaman adroitly refused to serve me more medicine until I aligned with him that this “part” of me needed to be expelled rather than integrated. Having grown up in a fairly agnostic scientific, engineering academic tradition, I had a general disbelief in the existence of “spirits”, yet this disbelief no longer lived in me as an arrogantly confident dismissal of the astral realm, as many of a scientific aptitude often have. In his phenomenal exploration of cognitive biases labelled “Thinking Fast and Slow”, the Nobel prize winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahnemann describes a logical fallacy that he titled (quite poorly I might add) “What You See Is All There Is”. This is a fallacy because there is almost always more going on in the world around you than what you see, because our senses are designed to filter information out. Such filtering of incoming information is for our own good – if we could truly perceive everything, our cognitive systems would get overwhelmed. A great demonstration of this fallacy is the famous Selective Attention test.

Try it out but don’t think you are not susceptible to WYSIATI even if you pass the test ;)

I had moved from an arrogant dismissal of the spirit world to an openness through my explorations of Buddhism. I had experienced first hand the powerful effects of meditation when in late 2016, 15 min of daily meditation had empowered me to my most successful interview season where I nabbed job offers from Facebook, Google, Uber, Amazon, amongst others, while being absolutely rendered non-functional the months before due to my first major depressive episode as my first marriage collapsed (and astrologically speaking, as I’ll learn later, I had entered my Saturn return). After experiencing this, I decided to get to the root source of meditation and ended up deep inside Buddhist scriptures.

This was after a couple of years (2016-18) of reading normie self-help books and seeing a similar Buddhist influence underlying all. Specifically exploring the Tibetan Buddhist classic – Lam Rim Chen Mo – the Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment. This was a classic written by Je Tsong Kha Pa, a Tibetan Buddhist monk and a prolific writer from the 1400s who is sometimes credited with having lit the lamp of Tibetan Dharma which burns bright till this day. He explored both exoteric (mainstream) and esoteric (secretive, tantric) Buddhist traditions and presented a very readable (thanks to the English translators too) rendition of the Buddhist metaphysics in the Lam Rim Chen Mo – much better than the very dry Abhidhamma Kosha, the Mahayana (mainstream) Buddhist presentation of Buddhist metaphysics. Therein, he describes the various realms of existence, categorized into – Pleasurable Heavens of the Devas (Gods), Human, Animal, Asuras (demi-Gods), Hungry Ghost (in-between Bardo state), Hells – that the soul cycles through as it goes on and on through cyclical life and death existence in the manifested Universe.

The Abrahamic cosmology is a narrowed focussed version of what is presented in the Buddhist version – one life, followed by purgatory (akin to Bardo) followed by eternal Heaven or Hell. I believe that this is a simplification presented to encourage cultivation of virtue in this present life, which is the ONLY life we have in this moment even though we may be reborn, but is mistakenly construed to mean a rejection of the life and death cycle. Some esoteric Christian philosophers have been able to see beyond this mainstream Abrahamic view and acknowledge the presence of other spirit realms of existence in parallel to human realms – for eg. the father of Anthroposophy – Rudolph Steiner. Mainstream Abrahamic viewpoints also hint at these other parallel realms of existence when they acknowledge the existence of angel beings and also accept the visions of Mother Mary like in the case of Fatima, Portugal.

So if it is true that spirit realms exist, then where might these be located? As I have ruminated on this question, I’ve come to conclude that these realms exist simultaneously with the physical realms that we inhabit but are hidden away from our perception via the selective attention phenomenon. It’s a bit like how we explore the subconscious dream space when we sleep but when we wake up, that space is no longer accessible to us. I believe that the subconscious dream space partly overlaps with the spirit realm and in most humans, there is a major perceptive block between the conscious and subconscious spaces. In some humans that’s not the case, for example in humans labelled Schizophrenic, I believe that there’s an unconscious access to the spirit realm that they don’t have control over. Or in Shamans from native, indigenous traditions, who have conscious access to the spirit realm with better control over it. But because our definitions of mental health are attuned to describe as “disease” anything that’s outside of the norm–thanks to generations of disembodied-intellectual, white, male domination of the organizations that come up with these definitions–a Schizophrenic ends up getting locked away instead of being trained as a Shaman.

I had only explored and ruminated about spirit realms intellectually before my Shaman presented me with this quandary – “Align with me that this ‘demon’ should be expelled and not integrated, else you won’t get more medicine”. I believed then I needed more medicine because I had been unsuccessful to gain clarity on whether I was sexually abused as a child. I was unable to reach the recesses of my consciousness where the answer was hidden and the pendulum swing I was on for 2 months prior from “hell no, there’s no way this could’ve happened” to “it is so clear that this has happened” could equilibrate into clarity – one way or another. More of my exploration is described here–

As I sat with this question on the first night of Ayahuasca, I realized that a root point of divergence between me and the Shaman was what to label this possible “intruder”. I perceived the Shaman to label the intruder as an “evil demonic spirit” – I actually don’t remember well now if he ever used the words “evil” but he definitely had used Christian language, and alluded to his Christ consciousness leanings and I perceive there to be a strong distinction between “Good” and “Evil” in Christianity. My own explorations of spirit realms via the Buddhist lens had led me to believe that all beings – whether they be human, animal, Gods, demi-Gods, Bardo or hell beings – all beings suffer and desire an end to their suffering. Even pleasurable heavenly God realms lead to eventual suffering as the karma runs out and the pleasures prevent any desire for emergence of spiritual work and the Gods end up being re-born into realms which have more explicit forms of suffering. The Buddhist in me believes that there is no “evil” but only misguided suffering beings attempting to rid themselves of their suffering. I hold this belief about all beings that are typically presented as “evil” including Hitler. I experienced this viscerally a few months later when I recovered memories of the second male perpetrator where he was sodomizing me from the front and I could see not only his angry adult self but also his weeping inner wounded child simultaneously. To be clear, a few days after recovering that memory, I still felt burning anger which wanted to torture and murder him on live TV, however in the moment of memory recovery and even now when I think of that memory, I could clearly see his inner child not wanting to do what his adult self was doing. I presented my view to the Shaman and only when I could label this spirit as a suffering being who did not want to remain stuck in my wounds but wanted to be freed instead of as an evil spirit who was intentionally inhabiting my wounds, could the medicine work and release the spirit from me. It was an exorcism, but not an exorcism of an evil ghost spirit, instead an exorcism of a suffering being from, perhaps, one of the Buddhist hell realms. I imagine that this spirit, living in my sexual wounds, was experiencing the traumatic events of my sexual abuse on a regular basis.

So then, does Evil exist?

My friend reminded me of a quote from the movie “The Devil’s Advocate” when I was having a similar discussion with him – “The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world that he did not exist.” Is that true? Could it be that when the Buddhist inside me speaks of evil not existing but only suffering beings existing, it’s a coping mechanism I picked up as a child being sexually abused. “Oh this adult doing horrible things to me sexually that I don’t want must clearly be suffering. That has to be the explanation.” Child me had to normalize the abuse in some way in order to survive and was this how I normalized it? I have encountered other adult survivors who talk of child predators being evil. Is that because in Christianity and other western cultures, labeling a person as “evil” is an essential step to allowing her to be stopped or killed? That definitely doesn’t seem to be the case in Hinduism, where in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna encourages Arjuna to kill almost the entirety of his own family but not because they are evil but because that’s his Dharma at that moment as a warrior. The eastern martial arts philosophy that I’ve encountered as I’ve explored Muay Thai seems to also believe that killing must be done swiftly, if at all. In moments where I’ve wanted to kill my second perpetrator from a place of trauma triggered rage, I’ve wanted to do so very slowly and torturously. The times that the Goddess Mother emerges in her varied forms to slay Demons, it’s presented as a swift decapitation. My Vedic education has made me believe that such swift decapitation is borne out of the great compassion of the Goddess Mother who knows that one of her children, the Demon, in this case, is unable to manage the sankharas within him and is unleashing destruction on the world and accumulating negative karma at a monstrous pace and the only way to help the Demon is to separate the head from the suffering body so that his conscious soul could be freed for another attempt at life.

So then, does Evil exist?

Has the Devil indeed pulled a blind one on me to convince me that She does not exist? Or is there no Devil in the first place? But just flawed beings of different realms all attempting to find light and liberation while sharing the limited resources that we have – the human body being the most prized resource because as the Lam Rim Chen Mo describes – human realm existence is the luckiest of existences where we have the right levels of suffering and time to process suffering so that we may be fully liberated from the cycles of life and death.

I don’t know for sure.