Last night I was not well enough to go to Aikido, so I watched a film, The Forest. It is largely set in the Aokigahara Forest, a place apparently popular for suicides. It was quite an engaging film and the early part of it brought back many happy memories of arriving at Narita and going to the Hotel New Otani in Tokyo. It was great to get to my room, put on a yukata, order a bento box and a couple of Asahi, then to look out over the skyline. Sarah the main protagonist is warned that the forest does weird things and that if she saw anything, she should remember that it was only in her mind and not real. Advice which she failed to take. As the film unfolded she started to have her inner demons surface. It did not end well for her.
I’ll hazard a guess that many of us have some inner demons, which from time to time come visit our minds. We may not need a mystic forest, it can happen on the tube train or when we lie on our pillow at night. Many, as I understand it, have problems getting off to sleep, sometimes it is just internal dialogue about the day, other times it is the demons. The minds of the allegedly sane, can be pretty strange places. And keeping it together is a bit of a struggle. You never know what goes on in the mind of another unless they tell you and even then, they may fib.
The thing is that most of these inner “demons” are born out of selective perception and come from blowing things out of proportion. Our fears and insecurities feed them, and they grow and multiply. Talking about them, getting them out into the light of day, can help to dissolve them. Laughter is a very good anti-demon tincture. All of us have the odd crazy thought or two. Some “demons” must however be faced, otherwise they keep on coming back. They can exhibit guile. The more we try to fend them off, the more artful they become, they shape-shift. Until we can accept that which is the seed of the “demon”, its roots, we cannot hope to weed it out from the garden of our mind. Pretending that an inner “demon” isn’t there does not work. Most of us don’t get to meet a group of yūrei, because we live in cities. Our “demons” are already here, we made them ourselves. And therefore, we might un-make them also. All of us have a dark-side and to be whole and free one has to eventually face it down.
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