How come harmful beings/entities in Buddhism, like Maras, titans, devas, hell beings, hungry ghosts, Piśācas, Rākṣasas, Bhūtas / Spirits, Nāgas (when hostile) can’t physically harm people? At most, they can only influence people to hurt others, and even then, the karmic conditions need to allow it for it to happen in the first place. Why do they need permission in the first place rather than overriding karma? As far as I am aware, they usually plant things like vasanas or intrusive thoughts to try to affect someone negatively from a distance.
Karmic debtors can physically harm you. You would typically understand it as cancer, or some really weird disease. I remember that story about a monk whose knee got possessed...
Testimonies allude that both the underworld and heavens have governance.
I meant like hurting yourself or someone else on the outside, a possessed knee, and cancer are internal things. At most, they have to influence a person to the point of harm rather than doing it themselves, physically. Like punching someone, or smoking a cigarette. None of these beings can actually force you to physically punch someone or shove a cigarette in your mouth.
Influencing to harm is harm. Perfect compartmentalizion does not exist, so wanting to harm will leak and bleed and corrupt other ideas and situations.
Do not underestimate the power of intention and attachment.
There's a sutta where a yakkha smashes the Buddha's best disciple over the head during meditation. The Buddha said the blow would have knocked out an elephant. Upon doing it, the yakkha instantly died and was reborn in hell, meanwhile the monk only experienced a slight headache.
I am not a rationalist, I believe Modern Science still has a lot to learn and scientists can make mistakes. However, I have never seen or heard of somebody hit on the head by an evil spirit during meditation. Maybe it happens to you only if you are at a very high level.Maybe.
Have you ever heard the math term “effective dimension”? Some (mostly physicists) researchers are currently putting together theories that structure consciousness as it’s own dimension of space/time instead of a discreet phenomenon situated inside of space/time. I am really reaching in terms of “proving” anything here but with this sort of framework in mind it would in essence mean that this conscious dimension cannot be effected by things that are not within the effective dimension, so if a being’s consciousness were so radically different from our own they might only be able to effect tangentially, to the degree that your mind shares an effective dimension, which manifests as influence instead of direct effect.
This sort of thinking can go the other way as well, “up” instead of “down” or even laterally. If your mind is sharing an effective dimension with a formless enlightened being then in physical or metaphysical terms there is a lack of discreet separation between the practitioners mind and the mind of a Buddha. I think this explanation is a little flawed but ultimately i feel this is the main goal of most vajrayana/tantrayana practices, which is essentially a super condensed and concentrated version of .
IMO just a way to think is all.
Do you agree that earth is a main dimension with subcategories on earth that would be different human minds? Do you agree that the human mind is in every dimension at once, but we just perceive the earth one the best and vice versa for other beings in other dimensions? Like would a hungry ghost perceive our earth and their different realm of experience/dimension the same way we try to perceive theirs with our earth? Are humans influencing other dimensions/different realm of experience solely from thinking like how a hungry ghost influences peoples addictions on earth?
Well i think it could be helpful to think of a dimension not as a place or a discreet thing but as a contributing condition to a specific appearance. I think human birth is considered precious because it is within the range of all possible effective dimensions, not that it inherently is in all possible dimensions. D=r*t basically.
I am confused because certain Buddhist followers say things like:
Hungry ghosts are dominated by craving → very narrow experiential range.
Gods are dominated by pleasure → little motivation to wake up.
Hell beings are dominated by pain → no space to reflect.
As if they reside in different unseen and invisible places.
But to me, it seems like you are saying it is all mental, so how can mental mentality itself experience a different mentality within itself? I am confused. Would this probably depend on which school of Buddhism one follows?
The traditional Buddhist way of saying this same thing is that it is all determined by karma, the activity of the mind and the charge it carries. Karma is ultimately a relative and mental phenomenon, and the mind itself is a condition by which karma depends. Sorry if i made this more confusing.
If someone died as a hungry ghost personified, with an unresolved addiction, would they be reborn in the hungry ghost realm and able to influence humans using their mind as medium?
Well i can’t say for certain but the way it seems to me is that the human and the preta would need to have a sufficient karmic relationship for such an event to occur. We think of karma as ripening and so in the case of a preta influencing a human both the preta’s karma and the human’s karma would need to ripen based on previous causes that create a shared event, since in this instance the interaction is the ripening of both beings’ individual karmic paths simultaneously.
As a pure theoretical question, is it possible that an addiction was formed from a preta and that preta targeted that specific person since the person may have been mean to him in some way when he was a human, and the preta can influence said person since there karmic patterns are ripe and in alignment? If I asked Google what causes an addiction, it would probably say things like habit, attachment, lack of skillful coping, suffering, and a superficial surge in dopamine. I would assume that Buddhists would agree with that, but does it ultimately come from the hungry ghost realm?
No. All things are empty of inherent existence. Nothing has a single cause.
This means that no phenomenon is the result of a single thing. The reason for a person's addiction is a combination of factors. Theoretically some of those factors can be other beings.
No, i mean i can’t be definitive but this directly contradicts what karma is conceived to be. Addiction is the culmination of the factors you listed and more. It’s just basically, no one else can create your volitive momentum/tendancies.
I think you're under stating the harm that can be caused by influence. It's why we believe in right speech. What you say can directly harm people; what you say can also influence them in countless harmful manners. I can't tell you how much I've what hurts me mentally is unconsciously internalized by what's been said, even things not said to me.