Ghostbusting: How to deal with a spirit in your home.

[Omar]

I find it strange that spirits should be attracted to money. And locking someone in a box is not nice at all.

Actually, this is how I try to initiate play with brothers and sisters at the London Kungfu class .

This is good advice sihing.. I shall up the ante and start kick the cars of people I wish to get acquainted with. I'm sure I will get plenty of new friends in no time

[Ninjagirl]

Well, I suppose you can compare the spirit world to life on earth.
Most spirits are good.
Most people are good.
When a person is not good, they may be taken to prison (a box) or in some countries executed.
I can say that I believe in rehabilitation, but what happens when it fails. What happens if criminals refuse to stop being criminals, well you might have to lock them up for good. For the good of the people.
Spirits are the same, they are mostly good, but if they refuse to be helped and if they refuse to stop being evil and terrorizing people, then you have to do something so that others can live in peace.
Malevolent spirits are luckily very rare.

[Kingmonkey]

Well, I suppose you can compare the spirit world to life on earth.

I'm not so sure about that....

When a person is not good, they may be taken to prison (a box) or in some countries executed.
I can say that I believe in rehabilitation, but what happens when it fails.

Is imprisonment a good way to try to rehabilitate someone? When it fails it might have been because the approach was poor.......

Thanks for your kind words Martin Sihing

Pat

[Ninjagirl]

I am not trying to imply that locking someone up is the best approach. Prison systems world wide or faulty because most try to punish rather than rehabilitate, but I don't really want to discuss that. I will say this :

Suppose in your city, police just arrested a psycho killer, who just blew up a city block killing 3000 people, this same person then took out his machine gun and killed an additional 30 people. The cops bring the person to you and say that his fate is in your hands. What do you do ?

Do you say put him in jail?
Do you say give him counseling and then release him when you feel he is sane? (If you choose this option would you choose it again if after he was rehabilitated, if he was still killing people and was caught again)
Do you give him a slap on the hand and a stern talking too?
Or something else ?

I am curious because I want to know what you would do with a monster. If you feel absolutely sure that binding a spirit to a box is cruel and wrong under any circumstance, then I want to know how you would handle somebody that is truly evil.

[Ninjagirl]

Also I am not trying to say that the spirit world is like life on earth. I am just trying to make a point. All I want to say is that you can have a evil spirit just like you can have a evil man. If this is so, how can you handle true evil. How can you handle a spirit that refuses to go, and who refuses to stop causing trouble. What can you do?

[Shaolinfist]

Hi guys, some nice points raised there by all.

Ninjagirl, I remember the story of when the great sage Padmasmbhava crossed the Himalayas to bring Buddhism to China he encountered the Tibetan people, who at the time worshipped the malevolent Bon spirits and practised evil rituals like drinking blood out of skull caps and human sacrifice. However instead of destroying these evil spirits (evil being a relative term) he converted them to Buddhism, creating a wonderful mix of Buddhism and the Bon religion that we all know as Tibetan Buddhism today.

Most, if not all spirits will see the way when helped by an Enlightened being. Angulimala was a mas murderer and even wore the ears of his victims on a necklace. He tried to kill the Buddha one day but he couldn't catch him. After lots of chasing eventually Angulimala collapsed on the floor exhausted and begged the Buddha to teach him. He became one of the best Arahants if I am not mistaken.

There are compassionate ways of dealing with danger, without sacrificing yours or other safety. I do not know the answer to your question about what we should do with dangerous criminals, but I am certain that there must be a better way of dealing with them than what the current system offers.

All the best,
Phil

[Martin Do]

Hi Ninjagirl,

I don’t think I have seen you in our virtual kwoon before. If you are new, can I welcome you here. Also, would it be possible to know your first name.

Suppose in your city, police just arrested a psycho killer, who just blew up a city block killing 3000 people, this same person then took out his machine gun and killed an additional 30 people. The cops bring the person to you and say that his fate is in your hands. What do you do ?

Do you say put him in jail?
Do you say give him counseling and then release him when you feel he is sane? (If you choose this option would you choose it again if after he was rehabilitated, if he was still killing people and was caught again)
Do you give him a slap on the hand and a stern talking too?
Or something else ?

I am curious because I want to know what you would do with a monster. If you feel absolutely sure that binding a spirit to a box is cruel and wrong under any circumstance, then I want to know how you would handle somebody that is truly evil.

Now there’s a question and a half . Seriously though, put in such situation, I would ask my Sigung for guidance and learn from his advice .

I feel these kind of topics can get quite political and intellectual and wondered if I should get into the conversation. However, I’ll give my instinctive opinion nevertheless for the sake of discussion. Also, I just want to say that my own “current” view, is not necessary representative of our school.

Firstly, I would not see / label the poor man who has killed all those poor innocent people as evil or as a monster.

For whatever reason, he has done what he has done and that it is unfortunate that the consequence is as catestrophic as it is. Irrespective of how we treat him, if we shred him into a million pieces and call him the most horrifc name known to man, we cannot bring back the lives he has taken.

I would be keen to really open up the man and try to understand what drove him to do what he did. To what extent are we as society are responsible for his actions. Was it his up bringing from childhood, the friends he had, the books he had access to, the movies he watched, the people he was able to idolised etc etc or was he just born to kill. Can we as brothers and sisters of this world do our bit to avoid any negative influences we may have had on these vulnerable beings.

Irrespective of what drove him to commit the crime, I would suggest that he has several choices.

1) If he regrets his wrongdoing then spend the rest of his life praying for forgiveness from the people he has killed and the families he has brought sadness to and spend much of his life doing charitable work of some sort. This in itself can bring much peace to him and much goodness to others.

2) If he has no regrets and does not wish to do the above then he would be locked up with minimal provisions where he will spend the rest of his life in discomfort and suffering for his crime. He will be offered option 1 from time to time if he wishes to take it.

3) As an option he can choose to leave this world if he wishes to through death. If he does I would advice he chants the name of a devine being and ask for guidance before his death. I would also wish him well with his onward journey and hope peace be with him.

These are obviously not very political way of dealing with such crime, but it is how I instinctively feel. at this present moment. Anyway, enough chit chat, its time to make my wonderful wife a cup a tea .

Best wishes

Martin

[Ninjagirl]

So kind and forgiving, all of you. Tough question though, I don't know if my question has any right answer.

[drunken boxer]

I remember Sifu discussing this on a course once - I thought his views were a great example of Yin Yang harmony! I can't remember them exactly so I won't try to recall them here, they might be in the q+a section somewhere.

I'll just give me personal view, which is that compassion is the most important thing here. To me, the people who need compassion most are the innocent victims and would be victims who did not decide to have crimes committed on them, rather than the criminals who did decide to go out and commit a crime.

So I think certain criminals like murderers, heroin dealers should be stopped, in order to show compassion to the innocent people who they have hurt, or would hurt in future.

[Chiahua]

http://www.shaolin.org/answers/ans07b/nov07-2.html

http://www.shaolin.org/answers/ans02a/jan02-2.html

[AlexBaranosky]

This reminds me of a dream I had way back when; in 2003 I think. I dreamt there was a great flaming horned demon who had my sister captive. He was as mean and evil as they come.

I tried and tried to come up with ways to save her from this demon. Nothing I came up with worked. It was futile, it was like nothing I could intellectually come up with could conquer this problem.

So in my dream I started loving the demon. It was almost like I CareBear stared him. For anyone unfamiliar with CareBear stares (hehe), CareBears is a cartoon from my youth, and they used to gather around people and love them and shoot rays of goodness from their chests. And then the person would change before your eyes.

So I was blasting the demon with my warm tender love, and INSTANTLY the demon turned into an angel and became the nicest being ever. He then set my sister free and asked us if we'd like to go join him in Heaven with the other angels.

To me this was a dream about Cosmic Truth sent to me from my inner self and I could feel that it was a very important message that I should take very seriously.

[gusty]

RE: what to do if?......Marvelous answers only arise in the moment....And the apparently same problem or issue can have an entirely different marvelous answer in another moment with different folks....this seems to me why academics are limited when making important decisions...the world would be a different place altogether were more people open to the marvelous..............Brother Alex, thanks for the care bear lesson, i am too old to have known about them, but sounds like a nice perspective shifter to me.

[Ninjagirl]

But dreams are aspects of your own persona, the demon was you to start with.... even so, I do like dreams with happy endings

[AlexBaranosky]

The dream was about the futility of intellectualization, as well as about the power of love and faith.

[Jimbeaux]

Phil (Shaolinfist),

How about an update in your situation? Did you find the satanic bible? I assume the occurrence has not repeated itself.

Just curious,
Jim