RISING RACE

“You are not today and you are not tomorrow. You are a thousand years ahead of you and a thousand years after you.” — Reinhard Heydrich

There are fierce demons standing guard at the gates of almost all Buddhist Temples. To enter the sacred space of the temple, you must pass directly between them. This is because all humans must come to terms with the demons of fear, aggression, temptation, ignorance, and their myriad of cohorts if we are to live a free and sacred life. They cannot be neglected. We all suffer from our personal demons; confusion, anger, self-hatred, trauma, longing, loss, addiction, shame, anxiety, fear, etc. Collectively, the force of these same demons create enormous suffering on earth – war, illness, hunger, etc. To alleviate these demonic plagues, we have to face the demons of greed, hatred, and delusion at their root. No amount of political or scientific change will end these plagues, unless we learn to work with our demons, individually and collectively. We must face these demons – with a heart of love and compassion. We must release our grasp to our greed, hatred, and delusion, so we can transform their energy and find freedom in their midst. We must not do it for petty ego, for this is the demon of delusion – we must do it out of pure and unrelenting love, that we may be free to help all beings, and lead beings towards the help they need in fighting their own demons. We therefore, need to feed our demons – not fight them. It seems contradictory, but when we realize that demons are not bloodthirsty ghouls waiting in the darkness, but are within us, inner enemies that undermine our best intentions … its starts to make sense. The more we repress them, the more we struggle against them, the stronger they become, the more they resist. Instead, we feed them, and by doing so, we cut through them, or in the authentic Buddhist practice which works according to the same Gestalt – “Chod”. We will tell you how to do this in a 5-part meditation; you will see, that by feeding our demons, we do not strengthen them, but instead, it allows the energy that has been locked up in them, to become accessible, rendering them not just harmless – but actually transforming them into our allies, in the process. While the technique we will show, is very similar to Tantric meditation … it is not, because we are not showing you Tantric Dharma. We are instead, taking the principles of Tantric Dharma, as taught by a very famous Yogini Machig Labdron, and integrating them into a Western Psychological therapeutic technique of “personifying a neurosis”. The goal is not to dominate a demon, it is to integrate him. No matter how many demons we try to destroy, more will appear in their place … just as no matter how many terrorists we kill, more will fill their ranks. To be effective, we need a new model … or rather, a very old model … based on compassion and dialogue. Give it a try, you’ll find it effective. (Next essay will contain the actual meditation) --- The malignant male and female demons Who create myriad troubles and obstructions Seem real before one has reached enlightenment. But when one realizes their true nature, They become Protectors, And through their help and assistance One attains numerous accomplishments. - Milarepa

It is popular to “take evil so seriously because this is real shit man” – it’s a form of danger porn, and ego stroking, “look at me, I am dealing with some dangerous shit man, you just don’t know, you better watch out, I’ve had some bad shit go down before”. Okay, if you had bad shit go down before, it is because you didn’t know what you were doing – just straight up. “The first condition of membership of the A.'.A.'. is that one is sworn to identify one's own Great Work with that of raising mankind to higher levels, spiritually, and in every other way.” - Magick Without Tears In other words, you can’t go into the Qliphothic with an Ego – in fact, you have to go into it with two things. 1. Non-duality with respect to Self and Other 2. Universal Love (sound familiar buddha-gang)? Crowley is very clear about this. And so, lets say you violate those two golden rules. Okay, then you’re right – the Ego gets fucking shredded, demonic entities begin eating your negative aspirations, and you go insane. That’s the danger of playing with magic. But, that could also be exactly what someone needs – because that Ego needs to be destroyed, in order to do the work. The ”Angels” healing you – what’s that? Backup for the Ego? If you have an Ego to attack in the Qliphothic, you have an Ego to reinforce in the Sefirot, and guess what – you’re fucking deluded either way. If you want Crowley to work for you; you’ve got to stop making him the “Evil” boogeyman, to stop “casting him out” and “exiling” him as “Evil”. And recognize that the Qliphothic is, indeed, what must be integrated, and that perhaps he had a reason for putting it up front. That perhaps the reason that “young women” touch Ceremonial Magic and then get into porn, is because they approached the Demons of their Insecurities, and instead of being Egoless and full of Universal Non-Dual Love – they decided they needed to do Porn to make themselves feel better about themselves, not realizing that this was the Will of the Ego in the face of the Demonic, rather than the True Will of the Integrated Tree of Life/Death in the absorbing the Qliphothic. All this pissing and shaking at the knees about Vampires and Astral Leeches. You’re not allowing it to integrate, because you are reinforcing its Otherness. You don’t have Love for it enough to want to integrate it, you want to burn it, or cast it out, or enslave it and make it do your bidding. It's bullshit and your system fucking sucks. Crowley had the right idea. You’re the fucking crazy one – when I meet a nasty demon, I become its friend. I feed myself to it, I give myself as an offering of the sweetest holy nectar, I let it tear my Ego into pieces, and I transmute that flesh and blood into the sweetest holy nectar – I give it what it really needs, what it needs to no longer be separated, but instead to be absorbed and integrated. The crazy thing is to KEEP IT as an "evil demon" - like what are you doing?! If you’re not willing to murder your Ego, every time you meet a demon, and to bring that demon into the embrace of love and non-duality – then you probably shouldn’t be in magic, because you’re just going to hurt yourself and go mad with your spiritual materialist ego. Don’t mean to be pissy, but your framework is garbage, and self-defeating, and your little holier than thou act is aggravating. Now we will give you a nice, simple, secularized Buddhist method of dealing with Demons. So you don’t have to try to wrap your mind around this Kabballah stuff, or deal with its limitations.

This World of Shells, Qliphoth, it is seen as the abode of fragmentation and the denial of life. So in the gematria meditation, Kabbalists are invited to discover the relationship between it, and the unity of the divine living spirit. This approach is described as “the return to the garden”. This is experiencing the mysteries of the Tree of Life, through working with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil – which more truly, should be named the Tree of Death. This requires a capacity to work with opposition and paradox, until the deeper unity underneath apparently irreconcilable positions is revealed. This led to the Kabbalist considering Evil as an obstruction, or covering, that restricts or occludes the energy of life, linked to the notion of shame and Adam and Eve needing to cover themselves with Fig leaves. In essence, this covers and obscures their, and our, sense of true being – so the word they gave to Evil is Qliphoth, a word that means shells, or husks, forms without true life, whose function it is to resist and stop the full expression of life. The Kabbalist who can unite the Tree of Life and the Tree of Death, to assist others both individually and collectively, is known as a Tsaddik “Righteous One” in Judaism, or an “Adept” in Christian Hermetic Kabbalah. In both cases, this is the one who has embodied the true image of the human being, which is in turn the reflection or image of the divine – the “teslem”. So what is the work at hand? The work at hand, is to embrace the Qliphoth, the Tree of Death, the World of Shells, the Underworld, the Demonic, the Evil – that which blocks and diverts divine life. This embrace is both within, and without – internal and external – and we bind them to the warmth of our heart, and restore them to the living. We are not casting out the demons, we are pulling them in, and transforming them, and unifying them with the divine life. In terms of psychology, this is “integrating the Shadow”. These demons can be what we call “energetic vampires”, or “energetic leaches” or just plain ole big nasty demons. But, we know also, as the ancient Greeks and Romans did – that demons are really daemons, and they have a good side, when you integrate them. It is only when Daemons are cast out of unity, into the Demonic, do they become “Evil”. Coming to Crowley now – when Crowley and his wife were on their honeymoon in Egypt, she went into a trance and dictated a text called “The Book of the Law”, which was strongly connected to an old Egyptian tradition of working with the unbalanced energies of Apep, the serpent demon of chaos, and bringing into being, a new creation. Crowley teaches how to absorb unbalanced forms and forces which come into your sphere of awareness. When you absorb them, the whole balance of the universe is restored. He says this works, only because he works with the principles of love and a will beyond duality, the “True Will” – so that his love has no object and no aim. In the doing of this, he has become one with everything and nothing, and hence there is no resistance in him to disturbance. Love connects him to all, and thus all can pass through him into unity. This is a daily activity of meeting the Qliphothic aspects of the universe as they present themselves to us and integrating them with the Tree of Life. It may not seem immediately obvious here – but this is a process of destroying the Ego. It is a “Night of Pan”, the womb of the Great Mother, where the ego-self must descend, die, and be reborn. Here there are monsters to be confronted, before the Hero can return to the world. This isn’t a bad system – not by any means. It is far healthier than the individual whom we are in discussion with, in that she is actually FUELING evil, by casting it away as evil, and keeping it separate and non-integrated. By maintaining the “otherness” of Evil, of trembling in the face of the Demonic, we increase it.

The nature of “evil” is a perennial human contemplation; all religions and spiritual systems have addressed it in one way or another. The default setting, at least in Abrahamic and Post-Abrahamic Culture in the West is to first – categorize “evil” as “other”. We cast it out, deem it dangerous and alien – sometimes literally, alien. We then attempt to kill it, or otherwise banish it, or enslave it. This violence against the Other of Evil, is applied to ourselves when we find something divided or split in our personalities and psychologies, something we would deem “Evil” – perhaps an all-controlling impulse to watch pornography, for example. But as we wage violence on our own divided psychology, (and find ourselves unable to win), we have done nothing but support and amplify external processes of Evil. We open ourselves up, and become susceptible to external beings, who feed on the negative energy of our violence carried out in vain, and we go deeper and deeper into depression and despair. It can get so bad, that we may even open ourselves up to become possessed or haunted or infested by some “Evil” force – whether that entity “smelled blood in the water” and was attracted to you, due to your negative emotional and psychological state, or was conjured directly out of your negative emotional and psychological state from somewhere deep in the unconscious, it makes no difference. You are under the whip of a demon. This is the default state we Westerners find ourselves in. This sense of exile and driving out goes to the heart of the Abrahamic religions. In Genesis, we find Adam and Even being driven out of the Garden of Eden because of the sin of disobedience and listening to the serpent rather than the divine presence. Their son, Cain, kills his brother Abel, and is driven out. Esau, the son of Isaac, sells his inheritance for a bowl of stew and is sent into exile in Edom. The act of disobedience that sets all this in motion, is eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which takes us from a place of union and communion with the divine, into a place of separation, and otherness from God, from “The Good”. We are so ashamed of our sin, that we cover ourselves with fig leaves, and are driven into the hostile wilderness to fight tooth and claw just to survive. Orthodox Judaism, Christianity, and Islam say that in order to remedy this situation, we must obey God and follow a set of religious rules so that we may be purged of our intrinsic evil, and return to the goodness and holiness of the divine presence. The Kabballah, the esoteric current of Judaism and Christianity, takes a different view, and points our attention to the other tree found in the center of the garden – the Tree of Life. This gives us a way of working with self and world so that what is perceived as evil or wrong, instead of being driven away or slain, is brought into the heart, and there undergoes an alchemical transformation in which the disturbed feelings, thoughts, and beliefs undergo a process of death and resurrection, which, instead of dividing the energies of life, unites and magnifies them. The Kabballah is a practice of prayer, contemplation, and a way of life that has its heart in this way of being, and is organized around this image of the Tree of Life, simultaneously the image of the True Human Being, and the Universe in which we find ourselves. In place of institutional separation and division, the Kabballah gives us paradoxes to contemplate, such as “the serpent is the savior”. In Hebrew, a letter is also a number, and Kabbalists believe that if two words have the same number, then there is a relationship between them. The word for serpent, NChSh, and the word for messiah, MShICh, have the same number and in a contemplative process called gematria, Kabbalists meditate on both words to discover their identity. Another such example is “one is the spirit of the living God”. This has the same number as “olam ha qliphoth” or – the World of the Shells.