LETTERS TO LOVEFRAUD: Spiritual encouragement for survivors

Oh man do I hate the use of religion to justify spath’s behavior and/or try to coerce you into “forgiveness”. After my ex left, he decided to join my Buddhist sect, which I had returned to after an absence of several years. It killed me to have leaders come up to me telling me how “sincere” he was. Of course, that only lasted a couple of months, but at our first child custody hearing he wrote in his deposition how “committed” he was to his “spiritual practice”, and in a recent e-mail used the language of my spirituality to try to weasel his way back into my life and demand my “compassion” towards him. (sorry for so many “”… it’s just such a cruel joke to me!) I asked around, and sure enough no one has seen him since he “joined” about a year ago. I want to call him on it to the court, but it would probably sound petty. It did, for a long time, cause me not to participate in any activities because I was 1) terrified to run into him, and 2) not able to deal with people asking where he was and how he was doing. “Don’t know – don’t care!” is not very “Buddhist”. Just another way he can terrorize me, I guess, though I’m the only one who can see it.

I found an old journal entry paraphrasing an article about the ancient Buddhist concept of the “Devil King of the Sixth Heaven”. Can’t imagine why I would have written about that. Sound familiar?
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“He’s not a real devil with horns and a giant poker, but merely a function in our life which ultimately desires for all of us to stay in the muck. If Buddha is on one end of the stick, the devil king is on the other. The devil king keeps popping up in my reading because this is who I must face. Takejizaiten is his name, which translates into “heavenly being who makes free use of others”. He is a metaphor for the deep-seated human desire to control others. He must control everything and everybody, and he does so primarily through making people dependent on him. Unlike the biblical demon, this one works his manipulation through feigned affection. To lure people and keep them under his control, he must appear downright lovable. He disguises himself as a best friend, a Buddha, or even a parent. His sole purpose in life is to keep people from achieving enlightenment. Whenever anyone practices, of course the devil king will appear. The devil king does not want anyone to free themselves from their karmic chains because it is a painful reminder of his own powerlessness and dependency. The paradox of this devil king is that he is controlled by his desire to control. He is a ruler who cannot rule himself. He is perpetually driven by his inner weakness and insecurity, never feeling satisfied. He is a prisoner of a prison he himself creates.

Violence is in the same realm of this devil king. Violence is a deliberate wish for the destruction of life. It is the symptom of the weak and passive self who must validate its existence by destroying lives or things valued by others. And yet violent people are weak and downright passive. They cannot find the inner strength to confront their own weakness and insecurities, so they must destroy others so they can be empowered. Their power, however, is an illusion since it is over others, not from within. Violence is an easy escape from feeling powerless and isolated. You don’t have to deal with the responsibility and effort of creating a real change within yourself. It is easier to hurt someone else than to get real about looking at oneself. The sense of power derived from violent acts is short-lived and addictive. It can only be sustained through more destructiveness. Compelled by their inner sense of powerlessness, violent people continue to destroy, and when they find nothing more to destroy or find themselves prevented from destroying others, they destroy themselves. Violence is not necessarily a reaction to external objects, but rather a destructive drive arising from inner weakness simply looking for a convenient outlet.

This is different from self-defense. Violence derives itself from a will to harm, while self-defense arises out of a will to protect. When feeling violent, it is necessary to look inward at one’s true motive – whether it is to preserve life or to harm life. The specific article I read on this concept used September 11th as an example. The “terrorists” felt they were sacrificing themselves for a greater good – which was really the result of authoritarianism. The passengers who fought off the seriously deluded individuals who sought to destroy life were also physically aggressive, but out of a sincere determination to protect life.”