Tea With Demons

Someone whom I've known for several years and respect for his simplicity and straightforwardness once asked me whether I had any fear. He'd briefly mentioned that, given that he was in his seventies, he now thought about mortality a bit more than he did in his younger days. I replied saying that nothing jumps out at me per se, mostly because I am at ease with life or whatever course it may take.

"So you don't have any fear, Swami?" he said.

It got me thinking. We were eating our dinner a few feet away from a glorious lioness who was eating hers. No, I don't mean some roaring woman, but a real big cat. The topic of fear, I assure you, had emerged on its own in the course of our conversation, completely uninfluenced by the apex predator at the end of our table. We were not worried by her presence, and that, I might add, was most likely due to a glass wall separating us.

But what does it mean if we have any fear? What is fear? How to overcome whatever this thing is? Or can we?

Milarepa, the great yogi of Tibet, spent his whole life confined to a cave. More or less. Born around 1052 CE in western Tibet, cheated out of his inheritance, he learned black magic at his mother's bidding and killed thirty-five people at a wedding feast. The guilt drove him to his guru, the lama Marpa. Whatever Milarepa learned from his master, he carried to his mountain cave and made that cave his permanent abode.

Legend has it that he lived on nettle soup until his skin turned the color of a green chili. Milarepa made up songs on the spot and sang them to deer, to passing hunters, to the cold, to anyone who visited him and cared to listen. Safe to say that Milarepa was the most wretched-looking figure in all of Tibet, and, by every account, the most joyful. With nothing left to seek, lose, or defend, he had earned a great reputation for being fearless.

And yet, his bloody past haunted him every now and then. Like a persistent debt collector, it refused to leave him alone and returned over and over again. And every time it knocked on his door, on his mind, it would rattle him, robbing him of his peace. In those moments, Milarepa would not just feel deeply vulnerable but completely worthless too, as if whatever he had attained meant nothing whatsoever. His past was his Achilles heel, it seems.

One ordinary morning, Milarepa went out to gather firewood, and when he came back to his cave, he found it full of demons. Demons of and from his past, of his karma, of his unresolved guilt. They had made themselves comfortable. One sat on his meditation seat, others were going through his few belongings, and the rest sprawled on the floor with their bulging eyes and long teeth, watching him.

Milarepa was irked. Then annoyed. Then furious. He shouted, he swung his staff, he threatened them with the power of his lineage and the fire of his realization, but the demons did not budge. In fact, they multiplied, and many more manifested.

So he tried the opposite. He sat down and recited to them his poetry, he delivered a sermon. He spoke to them of impermanence, of compassion, of the emptiness of all things, of the foolishness of clinging. Milarepa offered them the dharma with a straight and sincere heart, certain that any being who grasped the truth would get up and leave on its own, or better still, be liberated altogether. The demons heard him out politely, but then they laughed at him.

By now Milarepa was tired. Force, persuasion, wisdom, threat, nothing worked, but in that tiredness, a realization dawned on him. He saw that the demons were not intruders in his cave at all. They were simply fragments of his mind, scattered and splattered all over. These demons were his fears, his dislikes, his craving to have the cave arranged just so. To fight them was to fight himself, and every shove he gave them only made them more solid.

So he stopped. You are here, I am here, he told them. We may as well share the place. Stay if you like. He put the kettle on and made them tea. He sat down among them with no plan and no wish for them to be anywhere else.

Most of the demons vanished on the spot. One stayed. The biggest and most terrible of them, the one that carried his deepest fear. And to that one Milarepa did the strangest thing yet. He walked over and put his own head inside its mouth. Eat me if you wish, he said, and gave himself completely. With that, the last demon dissolved too. ¹

We have often been told that we must face our fears to overcome them, or that experiencing fear is a sort of weakness. But nothing could be further from the truth, and Aristotle would agree with me. For in the Nicomachean Ethics, he says, and I paraphrase, that courage is not an indiscriminate absence of fear. It involves responding to the right things, for the right reasons, in the right way. Recklessness, therefore, is not courage perfected, but a different failure of judgment. If you have never feared anything, ever, you may not have thought things through, actually.

When I say fear, at least in the current context, I am not talking about the startle of a sudden noise, nor the animal flinch that precedes all thought. That is a reflex, and reflexes are neither wise nor foolish, they are simply fast. I am talking about the fear that makes you uneasy, that may make your heart beat faster, the kind that may even restrict you from reaching your potential.

We do not fear what we are indifferent to. We experience fear only where love, or hope, or duty has already taken hold, and in this sense, it is not the opposite of courage but its raw material, the ore from which courage must be smelted. To be afraid is to have understood, however dimly, that the world can take something from you, and that you would rather it did not. Put plainly, you only ever fear losing what you are attached to.

Seen this way, fear is a form of attention that arises, above all, from the anticipation of loss. Be it loss of fame, wealth, respect, honor, love, or life, we don't want to lose anything whose loss would inconvenience us in any way.

Interestingly, Patanjali calls the fear of death or annihilation an affliction. He calls it abhinivesha, which could also be translated as clinging to life, and says that both the ignorant and the learned suffer from it. ²And it's not just our life but the life of anything at all. The life of our youth, our wealth, our jobs, our loved ones, anything. Knowing that life is impermanent and being entirely at peace with one’s own impermanence are different accomplishments. Milarepa had nothing left to lose and his past still came knocking every so often. Abhinivesha is not bothered by one's scholarship.

Ultimately, whether one is an adept like Milarepa or one of the normal folk dining next to a lioness, when fear takes hold, breathe mindfully and relax every pore of your being. And then do what Milarepa did. Sit down with it. Open the door, the closet, and invite the demons for a cuppa. Whether it's the test results, or the money running out, or some actions and decisions of the past, don't negate their existence or try to chant them away. Just tell them, you are here, I am here, we may as well share the place. It sounds absurd, I know, but it works considerably better than waving the staff and the shouting, take my word for it. Remind yourself then (and at other times) that nothing is permanent because nothing is supposed to be permanent. In the extraordinary, constant movement of the universe, there's never a stop. Nothing stops. Pay attention and you'll see the truth. Nothing stops. Nothing. Other than brief pauses here and there, if that, life is constantly on the move. Atoms, cells, molecules, organisms, creatures, communities, planets, galaxies, you name it, movement is the only constant.

If you see it that way, you will discover that death, in fact, is a cosmic impossibility. We pause, we transform, we transmute, we metamorphose, but we don't die. For if we did, the universe as we know it would cease to exist. If this sounds too far-fetched then consider that everything you call yourself was borrowed from somewhere and will be returned somewhere, and in all that borrowing and returning, nothing has ever gone missing. Not one gram, not one joule. Whether the part of you that says "I" survives the handover, we don't yet know. What I do know is that the universe has no delete key.

Tell me then, what is there to be afraid of?

I am not suggesting that you throw caution to the wind and break the glass enclosure of the lioness with a sledgehammer. (Remember, you may be a vegetarian, she is not.) At the same time, we can't curl up in fear and retreat into the darkest corner somewhere now, can we? After all, the coward and the reckless man are both, in the end, bad at perception, one seeing threat everywhere and the other seeing it nowhere. The courageous person is simply the one who sees clearly (or even vaguely) and moves anyway, not because they are unafraid but because they are okay with accepting that things may go south. And that most things probably will go south.

So what?

We will deal with whatever life throws at us. That is the only mantra I have for you, for me, for anyone whose fears have made themselves a tad too comfortable in their own mind. It doesn't take a Milarepa to understand that. Maybe an Om Swami reader, at the most.

Go on then. Put the kettle on.

Peace.
Swami
P.S. I look forward to seeing you live on 4-October at 6 PM IST. For those of you who are unable to be there physically, you are welcome to join me virtually as the whole event will be live streamed on my YouTube channel as well.