Recollection of the Buddha
Meditations
"I have a student who started meditating on his own when he was a teenager. He started sensing beings around him. Having been raised in the Catholic Church, all he knew was that spiritual beings came in only two sorts, really good or really bad, and there was nothing in-between. And these certainly didn’t look like the good ones, so he flipped out. As a result, he stopped meditating.
Later, after he realized that there are other ways of looking at these beings — that there are all kinds of beings out there, good, bad, and all the shades in between — he was able to start meditating again without fear of what he was seeing. The Buddha gives you instructions on how to deal with beings like this: how not to be overcome by them; how not to be afraid of them; how to be wary around them even as you wish them well; how to protect yourself from them. These are all there in the teaching.
And the worldview the Buddha gives in this regard is very useful. There are not just angels or demons. There are lots of different levels, with beings at many stages in terms of their goodness and knowledge.
It’s like having lots of different kinds of neighbors, the same as you’d have in the human realm. So that worldview can be extremely useful for people who are sensitive in this way."
~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Recollection of the Buddha" (Meditations8)
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