Bargain with the Devil

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me

Blaise Pascal

Demons are real. They’re everywhere. Just not where you think. They live in the shadows of our subconscious, their silhouettes ceaselessly skipping and slipping through our minds, bodies and spirits. Scaring the hell out of us. And into us. Demons are also amorphous. Their many masks hide many faces, each encapsulating the most dominant force in the history of humanity. One harnessed to overcome great barriers but more often to push down and control.

That force is Fear.

As an emotion fear is the most forceful energy in our mind-body systems. Its darkness attracts and repels us in equal measures, to the point where many of us are hooked on the cheap thrills of horror movies, yet afraid of our own inner shadows. For we have figured out that whatever we fear can be suppressed deep inside – where it really resides – if we project it outside: onto other people within our houses, workplaces, TV screens; onto foreigners, situations, natural disasters. Into demonic figures such as the devil.

T.J. CONNOLLY

We know pain evolved to protect us from physical harm. But why does fear exist? To protect us from feeling pain. Without pain, fear wouldn’t exist.

Fear is pain’s great edifice. Its various manifestations form an intricate mesh that surrounds and swallows up all the pain we’re afraid to feel – like layer upon layer of bubble-wrap – but also, in the process, many more emotions across the full spectrum of human feeling, including those that are positive and beneficial.

Ever visited a new city only to be dismayed at finding its most famous landmark surrounded by scaffolding? The steel, wood and netting hide the unpleasant areas being worked on, but also the parts of architectural beauty. The same is true with the psyche’s scaffolding of fear – what is beautiful in our lives is also concealed.

In a way, we’ve unconsciously bargained with the devil. We’ve swapped the raw feelings of pain – along with pleasurable feelings such as love, awe, wonder and joy – for the chronic yet often low-level experience of fear that enshrouds it. To the point where so many of us have forgotten what it’s like to feel anything else.

Nietzsche warned us to ‘be careful in casting out your devil, you may cast out the best thing that’s in you.’ The great philosopher hints at some thing interesting here: he connects the devil, our inner demon, to the ‘best thing’ within each of us.

What if he was right? What if the devil, and his cohort of demons, are fronts for something beautiful, powerful and positive? What if they represent the entryway to our awakening?

THE DAEMONIC RELATIONSHIP
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The Gideons have been furnishing beside lockers in hotels and motels with bibles since 1899. Spreading the word of God in their spare time, all for free (yes, they’re volunteers, and they encourage you to pocket them). Every one of the over two hundred billion bibles the self-proclaimed ‘professional men and their wives’ have circulated over the years is based on a version approved by King James VI way back in 1611. A choice which has helped it become the most famous and widely read version in the United States.

This may explain why James’ version stood the test of time but why was his name stamped on bibles in the first place (he’s not a pope, priest or monk after all)? To answer this, we must return to the time when, as the divinely-bestowed leader of the Scottish and English churches, the canny king commissioned the bible’s translation into English from Hebrew, Greek and Latin. An increasingly important endeavour following the separation of the nation’s church a century earlier (by his grandfather, Henry VIII). To cement its autonomy from the rest of Christendom, the country required its own re-biased, popery-free version of the bible. By overseeing the translation, James also wanted to solidify his reputation as a virtuous king, one in communion with the divine. And it worked.

The funny thing is, this wasn’t his first foray into the world of spiritual literature. Nor was it his first bestseller. Not many people know this but twelve years earlier James VI scribed an amazingly popular book about demons (even Shakespeare was enthralled, borrowing much from it for his masterpiece Macbeth), in particular, their devilish relationships with men.

Titled Daemonologie, it was inspired by his role as judge in the North Berwick Witch trials of 1590. This first major witchcraft prosecution in Scotland was a precursor to the what historians call the ‘golden age of the demoniac:’ a period of religious, social and political upheaval in which many thousands – usually young, female, and Catholic (and often with ungodly-looking birthmarks or moles) – were apparently seized by Satan, convulsing, talking in tongues, egesting foreign objects, and blaspheming. In Scotland alone, a country of less than a million people at the time, approximately 4,000 suspected witches were tortured, tried, and executed within a 50-year period.

It wasn’t an unlawful free for-all however: once suspected of being a witch, some rigorous tests were conducted. Floating in water was a clear giveaway – if you drowned, at least you proved them wrong. An alternative was heavy torture with an array of unusual instruments with novel names such as the Pear of Anguish (for stretching orifices) and the Spanish Tickler (for carving skin). Confessions soon flowed, as if on demand.

In Daemonologie, James sought to explain the history, practices and implications of black magic and necromancy to the masses. Using firsthand confessions, judicial case history and biblical scripture to support his arguments, he took the reader through the various qualities and behaviours that, for example, distinguished witches from victims of demonic possession. Pointing out, in this case, that witchcraft was caused by a conscious desire to manipulate the forces of evil against people and property; possession, on the other hand, was usually involuntary.

He also laid out a system for classifying infernal spirits and demons that plagued mankind. Two of the four groups – Fairies and Spectra (ghosts)

– were external and outward-focused, whilst the other two, Obsession and Possession, focused internally – the modern-day psyche if you like. Among the signs and symptoms of demonic obsession and possession were:

Bodily convulsions
Speaking in tongues or unknown languages
Blasphemous rages, obscene hand gestures, and profanity
Insensitivity to pain
Self-professed visions of Spectra (ghosts)
It doesn’t take a trained psychiatrist to draw parallels with modern diagnoses for mental afflictions. Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) alone could easily explain all the above. In this sense, James’ logic was strangely sound, as were his conclusions if we consider their context in time and place. He rightly saw that such symptoms occur for a reason – that nothing happens without an underlying cause. He also clearly understood that powerful agents or processes assumed control of the victims’ behaviour in a manner that was autonomous and independent of conscious will. He even referred to the effects of demonic influences as obsession and possession – terms commonly used in modern psychology to discuss disorders such as OCD and excessive rumination.

Of course, we know now there’s nothing supernatural going on here, intellectually at least. But how many of us really act like it? We may not be suffering from PTSD – though a significant portion of us are – but most of us, if we’re honest with ourselves, still outsource our hang-ups. If not to demons and witches, we project them onto those around us. And if that doesn’t work, we split off and abandon unwanted aspects of our psyches through suppression, repression and disassociation.

In short, every day we psychologically regress back to the Middle Ages to avoid dealing with our demons.

T.J. CONNOLLY

If you are struggling to believe this, it’s worth asking yourself the following questions:

Do you get anxious or restless when there’s nothing external to occupy your attention?
Do you turn to busyness/work/food/TV/alcohol/drugs/gambling/<insert distraction> to avoid being alone with your thoughts?
Does it feel like you’re constantly chasing after or running away from something?
Do you avoid certain people or situations for fear they may trigger unpleasant memories, thoughts or behaviours?
Do you regularly berate and criticize yourself for mistakes?
Do you stress and ruminate over what other people think of you?
Do you struggle to stop and see the beauty in life?
Do you have trouble sleeping?
Have you ever had suicidal thoughts, no matter how fleeting?
Every yes indicates demonic possession or obsession, but not by some external evil entity. These demons are much more insidious. They bubble up out of the cauldron of our conditioning, the symptoms of all we’ve suppressed and repressed.

THE ROOTS OF PAIN
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

Marcel Proust

In maps of antiquity, Greece is usually located in the middle while things get blurry and faded around the edges. It’s here, at the ends of known territories, where an image of a serpent or snake is often found. Ancient cartographers used them to signify uncharted and dangerous domains where ‘known reality stops…where man reaches the end of his conscious knowledge…where we project an archetypal image.’

Snakes and serpents were commonly used as they retain a deep and powerful message too rich to capture in language. A message inherent to archetypes – patterned ways for perceiving the world – that are infused deep within the human psyche, in this case as a universal representation of danger.

The Tree of Life is another example of a powerful archetype. This one however signifies something much grander – nothing less than the connection between heaven and the underworld, thus all forms of creation in the cosmos. Widespread across many religious and spiritual traditions, it’s got a bad rep in recent millennia however, due of its starring role in the Garden of Eden. But not all accounts portray it so negatively. The Gnostic gospels, for example, written by early followers of Jesus in the 1st century AD – long before the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were put to paper – described this ethereal Tree as entirely positive. Sacred even. To T.J. CONNOLLY them, its role in the downfall of man was nothing but slander spread by deceitful demons seeking to conceal its real purpose: to save our souls by revealing ‘gnosis’, the knowledge of everything, both good and evil.

A similar interpretation is found in the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah. Its texts record Eve’s apple picking not as a curse, but a catalyst for cosmic and personal cleansing. One that initiates a great sifting through of all that’s good and evil in the world in order to extract and liberate its ‘sparks of holiness.’ Once this vital process is complete, all evil in the universe is said to disappear.

Ancient beliefs and stories like these are heavily layered with metaphors and meanings, the most powerful and prevalent of which map to elements in the evolution of our psyches. In doing so they served as instructions passed down through generations – codes to guide the personal development and rites of passage for future kin.

During this great inter-generational bequeathment, the meaning of the Tree of Life, the grandest of all archetypes, evolved within the minds of men to also represent humanity’s general proclivity to seek pleasure – which Freud referred to as the ‘Pleasure Principle’ – as well as its ever-present opposite: our desire to push away pain. In doing so, the tree came to symbolise the non-duality of existence – the idea that everything encompasses its opposite: pain and pleasure, good and bad, heaven and earth, are all connected. Two sides of the same coin.

And it is this development that leads us, in an almost circular manner, back to Gnosticism, Kabbalism and indeed many ancient Eastern spiritualities. For a central belief of these philosophies is that truth, healing and wisdom reside and arise from a deep understanding that all dualities – including pleasure and pain, good and evil, heaven and earth – are one and the same. Parts of a greater whole. One should therefore, they maintain, go beyond ideas of duality in order to heal and become whole. And the most efficient way to do this is to somehow get up close and personal, not just with pleasure, but also with pain.

HOW TO HUNT DEMONS

Carl Jung, as we will see later in this book, was a great advocate of this process. He even adopted a Greek word nekyia to describe the ‘descent into the dark world of the unconscious’, a cavernous place of initiation and secret knowledge which must be braved and experienced first-hand prior to the ‘restoration of life, resurrection, and the triumph over death.’ The great psychologist-philosopher was not speaking of immortality here, at least not in its traditional sense, but of a personal and spiritual awakening, a freedom from pain, achieved by facing up to it.

Whether we call it awakening, awareness, freedom, truth or wisdom, all the major religions, spiritual traditions and myths that have stood the test of time call us to perceive reality as it is, warts and all. Not to filter it through the lens of our conditioning. Through their (often esoteric) literature, they are warning us that we’ll never obtain peace or happiness unless we make our way through these dark and desperate places, until we dive deep into the mud to work on our complexes at their roots.

What can aid us in this endeavour is the adoption of a powerful framework of practices and behaviours outlined in the following pages.

Used together these enable us courageously and intelligently face up to what Jung called the shadow regions of our psyches. Where we bury the roots of all our pains, shames and fears. This is where our demons live; hence it must become our hunting ground.

THE POSITIVE POWER OF NEGATIVE PSYCHOLOGY
God is not attained by a process of addition to anything in the soul, but by a process of subtraction

Meister Eckhart

The occultist Charles Webster Leadbeater caught sight of a slight thirteen-year-old boy as he strolled past the grounds of the Theosophical Society headquarters in Madras (now Chennai), India. Many children flocked near these grounds on a daily basis – for cooking, serving and schooling – but something stood out about Jiddu Krishnamurti. He had the ‘most wonderful aura he had ever seen, without a particle of selfishness in it’, Leadbeater later wrote.

It wasn’t long before he declared Krishnamurti a vehicle for ‘World Teacher’, an enlightened entity within the Theosophical Society faith.

His great task would be to oversee the evolution of humankind by facilitating the transfer of knowledge about the true meaning of existence.

A concerted effort commenced to educate and mould the child into a great spiritual leader.

Fast forward twenty years to 1929. After travelling the world and developing a global group of adulating followers, Krishnamurti underwent a series of mystical experiences which ultimately led him to completely renounce his lofty role and titles. Resigning from the various trusts and organisations, including the Theosophical Society itself, he returned HOW TO HUNT DEMONS all the money and properties donated to him (including a Dutch castle bequeathed to him by a fervent follower). Deciding to take his own path, he dissolved the order that was set up to support him with the following words:

I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along a particular path…I am not concerned whether you pay attention to what

I say or not…I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.

Krishnamurti dedicated the rest of his life to advancing humanity’s understanding of the nature of the mind, becoming one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century in the process. Eckhart Tolle, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley and many more philosophers and authors attributed much of their inspiration and collated wisdom to his teachings. As did Anthony De Mello.

Like the Jesuit priest, Krishnamurti cut through the esoteric like a knife through butter. His sole aim was to get to the crux of the matter, as quickly as possible. What matter? Pain and suffering of course. Like splinters in the mind, he understood that these fundamental human afflictions amplify and proliferate the longer we ignore them. That it makes perfect sense to address them at their source as soon as possible, via the most powerful tools we have: attention, awareness and understanding.

Krishnamurti believed that to resolve every problem, only one thing is really needed: that we truly understand it. Then, he reasoned, ‘the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.’

The alternative to this, of course, is to ignore what we don’t like, and inevitably suffer the symptoms of unattended splinters. Infections, in this case, of the mind.

We might call this approach ‘Negative Psychology’ because it doesn’t try to suppress or circumvent pain and suffering by focusing on more positive things. In this way it’s the polar opposite of the popular Positive Psychology movement which aims to plant and cultivate beautiful flowers and vegetables (read mindsets and habits) on whatever soil (read subconscious) that already exists, even if this soil is already full of rocks and stones (read trauma and conditioning). Yes, you might have some pretty nice flowers for a few days, weeks even, but are they really going to last? And, more importantly, proliferate? A more permanent and expansive solution involves churning up the soil, digging around for all the stones and rocks, then casting them aside. Now the soil is fertile for flowering.

Just like you can’t run a marathon with a broken leg, you can’t achieve happiness or success in life without fixing what’s broken first.

Negative Psychology acknowledges the fact that we must first find and face the poison in our psyches and minds, then suck it out like snake poison, assimilate it, whatever it takes.

Some might say pain and suffering are such negative things to focus

And they’re right. But it’s extremely effective and life-affirming if we go about it in the right way. Based on decades of clinical research and millennia of spiritual practices (not traditions, but actual meditative, experiential and psychological practices, many of which are outlined in this book), removing negativity at its roots within the subconscious is proven to leave us in a state where happiness, peace and presence naturally flourish. As natural as the body heals itself when treated and rested.
HOW TO HUNT DEMONS

This state can be described as ‘uncaused’ because it’s where our minds reside when they’re not misguided and controlled by a life’s worth of conditioning and trauma. And the way to get there is to remove something, not add something. That something is the pain and fear driving the deepseated negative habits, beliefs and behaviours that are holding us back.

This way requires a shift in understanding. A change in our perception of pain and how to deal with it that’s based on a set of principles and practices that together comprise the PAIN Process.

THE PAIN PROCESS
The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding

Leonardo da Vinci

Transforming pain into peace and power is a cyclical process that requires understanding and adopting four patterns of behaviour.

While honed for pragmatism and effectiveness in today’s world, this way of living derives inspiration primarily from Buddhist psychology, in particular it unpacks, modernizes and reframes the ancient practice of Vipassana (which translates from its original Pali as ‘to see things clearly’). Complementary sources of wisdom and techniques common to other spiritual, self-healing and psychological traditions are also woven into this framework. The process begins with us recognizing harmful patterns of behaviour by slowing down and paying attention to what’s going on inside of us; then cultivating the ability to allow what we see and experience to exist without trying to fix or figure it out; next, we embody curiosity and courage to subtly investigate the nature of these patterns, to get under the hood in order to understand the drivers of self-sabotaging behaviours; finally, we adopt and embed a sustained mode of living that allows us to assimilate and harness the power of our demons on a daily basis.

HOW TO HUNT DEMONS

It’s four powerful, repeatable, and interdependent disciplines:

Perceive (P),
Accept (A),
Inquire (I),
Naturalize (N).
Together they form what I call The PAIN Process.

We will deconstruct and trace the use of these principles and practices by some of the greatest minds in history. We’ll look at them through the lens of domains as diverse as martial arts, artificial intelligence, anthropology, computer science, neurology, chaos theory, exploration, dance, systems theory and business. We’ll see up close how successful people leverage these disciplines on a daily basis to process pain in a healthy manner, freeing themselves up to operate at increasingly higher levels.

The PAIN Process is essentially a framework for finding inner demons and converting their power into energies that allow happiness and well-being to flourish. By developing the ability to practice its tenets you’ll experience first-hand how our deepest pains and fears are not only to be welcomed, but honoured as catalysts for lasting change and personal development.