HAVE YOU MET YOUR DEMONS?

I've been thinking about demons. They have been relegated to the domains of folklore, archeology, psychology, psychiatry, or used as entertaining subjects for fiction and film. Although aware that there are still people who believe in the literal existence of demons, we - the sophisticated and enlightened - distance ourselves from such naivety. If we want to search for the source of negativity, we look within ourselves. Or, if we need help, go to bona fide experts, scientific and/or spiritual, depending on our tastes and our budgets.
Yes, but.
In the past few weeks, I have been more than usually plagued - plagued I tell you - by a sense of being controlled by, yes, forces that do not have my best interests at heart. Hear me out before you decide that I'm denying, avoiding, displacing, projecting, introjecting, not sleeping enough, not getting enough exercise, not being here now, eating the wrong foods or losing my marbles. All those suppositions are reasonable and, possibly but not certainly, correct. But they are not necessarily apt. Apt is the key that fits in the lock that opens the door of your house. Reasonable is realising you left the keys in your other bag, inside the house.
So, in search of aptness and keys, my thinking led me to reject the supposition that it is I, myself, who constantly puts blocks in my progress towards that happy state when I am, or will be, at my best - physically, mentally, spiritually, creatively - energy freely flowing in and out, living and working in a way that feels true. I rejected the sophisticated concept that we are our own worst enemies and that all those self-defeating machinations lie deep inside our teeming Freudian unconscious, to be fished out only after long, arduous and boring introspection.
Instead I started drawing pictures of my demons. The ones who are dead against my reaching the fully functioning, all-systems-go, happy human state. Why are they dead against it? Because they're jealous. Because they're demons and can never ever reach bliss. So they machinate. That's what demons do, they machinate. But, ha ha ha, by drawing pictures of six of the ones who plague me, I have exposed them to ridicule and hence, punctured their power.
It was simple: I just identified the activities or states of mind which take over, against my will and wishes, distracting me from whatever it is I really really want to focus on. Then I visualised what they look like and drew them. Here they are. I'm not going to say what each of them stands for, that's private, but you may recognise them if you happen to have similar demons buggering up your progress towards bliss. Or you might like to try drawing your own demons.
Like I said, this is not reasonable. But it's apt.
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