Demons, Angels, Aliens, Interdimensional Beings & ZEN

Added: 2026-06-05

[00:00:00]Hey friends, today's video is going to be quick and dirty. I'm not even wearing pants today.

[00:00:10]This is my mime outfit. What I wear this around the house and sometimes I also have my mime hat on. My girlfriend says, "You look like a mime, like a French mime." And then I mime for her.

[00:00:28]>> [laughter] >> I'm a mime.

[00:00:42]Your humble mime had dinner last night with one of the most wonderful and beautiful people your humble mime knows, and I cannot um give you the identity of this person because I don't want to mischaracterize their wisdom. So, we were talking. This person practices in the Vajrayana Tibetan lineage and also for a while practiced in the Zen Buddhist lineage.

[00:01:08]And what they were saying was, you know, Zen it like deals with the Dharmakaya, which is the absolute. And the there's three bodies of the Buddha traditionally in Buddhism. There's the Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya, and Nirmanakaya. And that I'm going to unpack all this, don't worry. I don't even know what it all means, okay? I didn't get taught this by my teacher.

[00:01:29]Anytime anybody ever asked my teacher any kind of question with a fancy $5 Sanskrit word in it, HE WOULD SAY, "TOO MUCH THINKING. GO DO ZAZEN." AND that's all I got from the guy the 10 solid years that I studied with him.

[00:01:46]So, I too I look to the internet for answers to deep questions about Buddhist terms. So, we've got we've got three terms, Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya, and Nirmanakaya. Dharmakaya is the absolute, which I've talked about here on this channel. Nirmanakaya is the manifestation here in the corporeal realm, okay? Here in nuts and bolts and chopped cooked vegetables, which I just ate. Hopefully there's none of it in my teeth, uh reality, right? The reality of bus timetables, the reality of paychecks, the reality of Instagram, reality, reality, right? And then there's the Dharmakaya. And how do you think about the Dharmakaya? Well, one way is the way my teacher used to put it. He used to say, "We all share one cosmos." He said if we didn't share one cosmos, we couldn't talk to each other.

[00:02:38]We couldn't interact with each other.

[00:02:40]So, there there is a fundamental and undeniable unity. We could call that the Dharma- Dharmakaya. What about in between Dharmakaya and Nirmanakaya?

[00:02:49]There's something called the Sambhogakaya, which my teacher didn't talk about too much, but my friends Vajrayana tradition talks about. Okay, now how do we think about Sambhogakaya? Let's see what the internet says. Sambhogakaya, body of enjoyment, a subtle luminous form that arises from the Dharma body, okay? It is a reward body of wisdom appearing in advanced bodhisattvas in divine heavenly realms to teach them. So, for example, when you're meditating sometimes you have cray-cray visions. I used to get um hypnagogic faces in the in the middle of sessions where I was really exhausted. So, hypnagogic you see you see an actual face of a person that you've never seen before in your entire life. It's um I don't know, coax up from the bottom of your sleep-deprived brain. They were quite interesting when I would see these faces. Or you can have a whole hallucination when you're sitting and meditating. Um either when you're just at home at the end of a work day or during a long intense training season or retreat. In Zen Buddhism, we call these makyo. But, in the Vajrayana lineage, one works with these makyo. One even perhaps considers them to be enlightened beings or entities from a different realm that you can work with, that visit you, that you can kind of dance with. The dance of the Dakini in Vajrayana, Vajrayana, Vajrayoni, Vajrayana Buddhism, for example. Why am I bringing this up?

[00:04:29]Simply as a reminder that there are a lot of ways to skin the Dharma cat, to skin Nansen's cat, okay? Zen Buddhists can be a little bit stiff and a little bit rigid, right? Like all kinds of interesting, fantastical, wild things can happen inside the mind when you're sitting or if you take a psychedelic substance or during like a dream state or even sometimes when you're just resting, you can have visions. You can hear from the dead.

[00:05:00]This happened to someone I know recently. A scientist, a very practical, logical person who has in many ways a kind of a new atheist's mentality, a kind of a show me the data, then we can talk mentality. But, this person is also very, very open-minded and they were walking across the room. They turned a light bulb because it had come loose in their light and the light bulb flicked on and suddenly the person's dead aunt was in the room, quite literally in the room. Now, it was not like a bad Twilight Zone episode where there was a person standing there where there hadn't been one before.

[00:05:39]This uh there was a new dimension, you could say, that was entered and this person talked in their head to the dead ant and received a kind of a update.

[00:05:51]Everything's good. You're going to be fine. You're going to live to a ripe old age. Please speak to my son and let him know he's going to be okay. And the dead ant also said or communicated, I'm always here anytime you want to talk to me. So, I am inclined to want to maybe put a little bit too much interest in these supernatural experiences. I mean, I probably talked about this before.

[00:06:17]When I was a young Catholic boy, I would sit in front of uh we had this huge Virgin Mary statue in in our school. And you know, this flat-chested virgin was standing on top of this weird serpentine childlike Satan and she was kind of crushing this um bizarre squirmy little demon underneath her bare toes. I have no toe put fetish, but there was something kind of erotic about the Virgin Mary's toes. I think it's because it was like the only part of her body that was really showing other than her hands and her face. Anyhoo, um so, I would sit down kneel down in front of her and I would pray and I would pray and I would pray and I just I'd be staring at this face like trying to coax [snorts] like a tear out of it, you know, a tear for for the sins of mankind or maybe a a wink, you know, like an ironic miracle, you know, like I'm here.

[00:07:17]Yeah, uh-huh.

[00:07:18]Needless to say, this this stuff never happened. I even experienced a miracle when I was young and in Catholic school.

[00:07:26]Uh you know, it wasn't really a miracle. It was kind of an experience like I went I was you're a kid. Remember that when you were a kid and we had the girls bathroom right across from us and the boys bathroom here and like the girls would run into the bathroom and slam the door and the boys would run into the bathroom and slam the door. And like like we were always trying to look into each other's bathrooms. And the bathrooms were this weird like Narnia closet where you step into this other world, right? So so I I would like excuse myself from school because I hated it and I would go to the bathroom and I would just sit in there, right? And at one point I remember like staring out the window and three orbs of light coming down.

[00:08:04]>> [laughter] >> I remember thinking this was my miracle and I was filled with light when that happened. The problem with chasing after these experiences or attaching to them when they happen is that they always they they stay in the past and their influence on the present dims and dims and dims, right? So I have found it extremely helpful as a practitioner of Zen Buddhism to to not put stock in or too much stock in these kinds of experiences. And yet to be open to them, okay? To not shut down, to not be arrogant, to not to not like get caught up like a like a little Dharma bureaucrat in my Zen way of looking and thinking and doing things, you know? If it doesn't happen inside the zendo when I'm sitting on my little cushion and if Rinzai didn't talk about it in that slight tiny little book, the Rinzai Roku, then it just don't matter. The Zen perspective as I was taught it is pretty interesting. That could be. Yeah, there may be ghosts, there may be spirits influing this influencing this realm.

[00:09:22]And that's kind of where I wanted to talk about and get to today. I heard a I heard a guy the other day who's a very popular um podcaster and he's a he's Catholic or Episcopal or one of these um um and he talks very clearly about how his religion influences his politics. So, he believes, like a lot of religious believers do, and I'm I'm kind of talking about now the monotheists, the big three. We know what the big three are. I'm kind of talking about the big three, okay? And now, I'm going to get to something I was talking about with my friend last night, okay?

[00:10:06]I deeply hope, and I don't mean to offend anyone now. If you get offended by people who kind of talk smack a little bit here and there about the main three monotheisms, I understand that because I was raised Catholic and I don't like it when people smugly and for no apparent reason mock the big three, okay? But, I I want to ease my way into a point here.

[00:10:28]This podcaster is talking about how he has a belief in God, all right? But, concomitant with this belief in a supreme being who is all good and fundamentally separate from mankind is the demon entity, right? There's a demon, so there's Satan. So, this podcaster has a belief in fundamental good, fundamental evil, right? So, God is he God is, you know, with us, but also Satan and Lucifer are at work in on our planet. And you can see Satan and Lucifer, this podcaster says, through people's actions and activities and through certain groups.

[00:11:19]Certain groups of people, say, open-minded, libertine, circuit party, pill poppers.

[00:11:27]These are people who have let their defenses down and Lucifer is probably working through them. Now, there are other political groups who unbeknownst themselves or perhaps been known to themselves because it's possible there's someone who believes in like true evil.

[00:11:43]So, perhaps they are consciously manifesting the devil's will in the things that they do. So, you've got all over planet Earth, you've got people who are working for good, people who are working for evil, people who are working who who are manifesting good and don't really know it. They're just kind of good people and people who are manifesting evil and don't really know it. They're just giving in to their desires and their greed and temptation and thus are manifesting the devil.

[00:12:08]Okay, if you have this belief in good and evil and those two things being fundamentally separate, you have kind of a Judeo-Islamic-Christian point of view, okay? Now, the mystics within these lineages, of course, say different things. John of the Cross or Meister Eckhart or Rumi within the Islamic lineage. Although, if you talk to Muslims, very often they will tell you, "No, Sufism is not Islam."

[00:12:44]And in fact, that's what you get a lot of the time when you speak to more orthodox practitioners within the big three. They tell you that the mystics are not fundamentally contained within our specific tradition and that's true.

[00:12:58]Now, my friend practiced in the in the in the Vajrayana Tibetan tradition. I practiced in the Zen Buddhist tradition and I was asking my friend. I was saying, "Am I getting something wrong? Like, do the Christians, do the Catholics, do the Jewish practitioners, do the Islamic practitioners, do the people that compose like the majority of the religious practitioners on this planet?

[00:13:25]Like, am I getting something wrong? Do they all or most or fundamentally kind of all of these belief systems tell us that there is a like I have a human soul and that human soul is is really in its essence separate from God. And and I am a caretaker of the soul and it's my job to water and feed and nourish that soul with good acts throughout my life so that it can flourish [snorts] one day in heaven forever. And my friend told me, I think that is fundamentally what these different groups believe or or practice or it's somehow the result of certain interpretations of the the the monotheistic religions. And this this is in my yeah, how are they what the is wrong with that? Not good is what I would say. Nobody do. It's not good.

[00:14:25]It's not sophisticated, right? So, um again, returning to the Zen perspective.

[00:14:31]Yes, there's a a we're we are I am open to the dead coming to my friend and talking to my friend, right? I am open to people taking shamanic journeys with ayahuasca and going to a potential underworld where maybe there are entities contacted from other dimensions, baby. I don't know. I'm open to all this, right? But in Zen Buddhism, the the attitude we take is, "Oh, interesting. Interesting.

[00:14:58]Perhaps there are other dimensions.

[00:15:00]Perhaps there are there is a spirit world. Perhaps that spirit world influences this world in some like fundamental way, but we don't attach to these ideas of good and evil or saints and sinners or God and and the devil, right? And there are really like deep consequences if you hold that I would say Zen and Prasna Vajrayana point of view, but also the point of view of I think lots of mystical practitioners who are outside of the big three, right?

[00:15:34]Who are operating independently of like the mental strictures that I think that kind of monotheism places on people, the traps it puts you in of thinking about things in these dualistic terms of good and evil, right?

[00:15:49]And that podcaster I was telling you about, I mean, it's it the his notions of good and evil affect his entire life and his and his life's work, which is important life's work because he's he's his words are in a lot of people's ears and he's getting them to think that there's evil in the world and that evil has to be combatted. But my teacher used to laugh and he used to say, "Ha ha ha, you know, you people you believe in good and you believe in evil, but but but you but what's but but but the things [clears throat] that are evil are the things that like negates you and the things that you call good are the things that affirm you and affirm the people you love and affirm your tribe, right?

[00:16:33]Because we all know how that's working these days. Like there are certain religions that demonize members of other religions, certain religious people have power, they have influence, they create political structures and then or they create underground groups and these people all do explicit damage to each other. They kill each other, they blow each other up, they slaughter each other in the streets. That's all because of there's some beautiful, wild magic at work in our world and instead of just being open to it and saying, "This is all one big dharmakaya."

[00:17:18]And then down here on planet Earth we're in our bodies and situations, the Nirmanakaya.

[00:17:24]And then in between there's the Sambhogakaya. Perhaps it's a spirit world, perhaps it's a hallucinatory world, perhaps it's a world of saints and ghosts and demons and entities, right?

[00:17:37]Instead of saying cool, I'm open to it, many of the world's religions bid us to be suspicious, suspicious of certain unseen invisible energies which may be demonic and outright antagonistic towards those around us who we think might be manifesting those demonic energies. To which I say fooey. And it is with that fooey that I close this video. If you'd like to support this channel, you can go here to patreon.com/shows on Jack Kornher. There's also a PayPal link in the video description below. You can support this channel there. Friends, I really think there are aliens out there [snorts] somewhere. I really think there are interdimensional galactic beings.

[00:18:22]There might be demons, there might be angels. The world, as the bard said, is far, far greater than is dreamt of in our philosophies. It is not frightening, it is freaking awesome.

[00:18:35]Catch you later.