Categories: Teachings on Mara
May the blessings of the Triple Gem be with you all!
Welcome. For those of you who are practically exploring life and seeking to understand the mind, we hope to illuminate another important matter today. We have previously offered a series of teachings about a figure known as Māra. He is a personification of the forces that obstruct our spiritual progress, hinder our meditation, and pull the world towards unwholesomeness and suffering.
We’ve spoken about how he can subtly encourage wrongdoing, even using technology to lure people into harmful actions. If you are new to this topic, we encourage you to explore our previous articles on Māra to deepen your understanding. Today, we will discuss a particular aspect of Mara’s deception that you may not be aware of, a trap that many have fallen into.
Understanding Māra and His Domain
I don’t need to speak at length about who Māra is, as our earlier teachings cover his location, his methods, and the vast retinue he commands. This retinue includes generals, ministers, commanders, and even Māra’s sons and daughters,each with different roles.
Their fundamental belief is that this world and all beings within it are under their control. In a way, this is true. As long as our minds contain what are known as kilesa, mental defilements like attachment, aversion, and sensual desire, we are easy for Māra to control.
However, those who strive to suppress, manage, or completely eradicate these defilements begin to slip from his grasp. When we become difficult to control, when we no longer do his bidding, Māra and his entire assembly turn their attention towards us. They begin to actively create obstacles. Understanding this dynamic is crucial for anyone on a serious spiritual path.
The First Glimmers of Spiritual Progress
When you begin to develop your spirituality, whether through calming meditation (samatha) or insight meditation (vipassanā), a natural shift occurs. Some people may completely renounce sensual pleasures from the very beginning. Others gradually distance themselves as their spiritual practice deepens. T
his process involves protecting your virtue, particularly the precept of celibacy (brahmacariya), and guarding the senses, the eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body. You cultivate mindfulness (sati) and begin to understand the defilements, the attachments, and the aversions that arise in your own mind. This growth is gradual, leading to a broader understanding.
Māra and his forces pay special attention to those who walk this path. During this journey, a common phenomenon can occur for dedicated practitioners: memories or visions related to past rebirths may begin to surface. This is a normal part of spiritual development for some, but not for everyone. Many people we know have had this experience, and it is here that we must be exceptionally careful.
The Alluring Trap: Visions of a Glorious Past
As you practice, your mind becomes more refined. Certain spiritual faculties may awaken. For example, you might develop what is known as the ‘third eye’ or divine eye (dibba-cakkhu), an extrasensory ability, along with the faculty of remembering past lives (pubbenivāsānussati).
With these two knowledges combined, you might see a vision of yourself in a recent historical era, perhaps as a famous and noble king in Sri Lanka, like during the Anuradhapura or Polonnaruwa periods. You might see yourself as a great ruler who served the island well.
At this stage, your defilements are not fully eradicated or even suppressed. When you see this vision of royalty, you can confirm it for yourself, thinking, “Ah, this king was me.” This is one possibility, a genuine memory arising from your own practice.
However, another factor comes into play. Perhaps even before developing these abilities, you had a fondness for history, movies, or books about heroic figures. Nearly every unenlightened person, man or woman, feels a sense of attachment and delight at such a prospect. It’s exciting to think, “I was that great king! I made my country prosperous!” This is precisely the weakness that invites Mara’s deception.
How Māra Plants the Seed of Delusion
Māra recognizes this subtle weakness within you. Using your own developing psychic abilities against you, he can subtly insert a thought or even an entire vision into your mind while you are exploring past lives. He can show you a royal lifetime that is not yours. This can happen as a mental illusion, but sometimes the information feels completely real.
This is why in our practical meditation programs on the third eye, we stress the importance of verifying visions by making resolutions and checking again and again. These deceptive messages can be sent by Māra himself, or by one of his ministers, commanders, sons, or daughters.
They have different departments, much like an army has different units. Some specialize in derailing the spiritual path, while others focus on providing destructive technologies to the world. You can perceive these things for yourself as your spirituality develops, or you can learn from the accounts of those who have.
Māra plants the thought: “You are this king.” At first, you might be skeptical. But Māra knows this seed will grow. You don’t accept it wholesale immediately, but you don’t reject it either. A subtle fascination takes root. Gradually, that seed sprouts, and soon enough, you are no longer just a meditator, you are a meditating king. You have fallen for Mara’s deception without even realizing the vision itself is a form of sensual attachment you’ve become trapped in.
The Spiritual Path Unravels
Once you are caught in this trap, your journey stagnates. When you see an attractive person, you might begin to think, “She must have been my queen in that past life.” When you visit ancient ruins, the poison grows stronger: “Ah, I built this reservoir. I constructed this temple.” This experience is a common way for someone with genuine spiritual potential to go astray. This happens to practitioners of both tranquility and insight meditation.
Slowly, you drift away from your practice. If you begin to pursue a relationship with your supposed ‘past-life queen,’ your meditation time dwindles. Your devotion and chanting decrease. At this stage, Māra might introduce another powerful concept prevalent in society: the idea of being ‘Diyasena,’ a prophesied future king or savior. This title gets attached to your new identity, and you fall for that as well.
Look at the message here: even with genuine psychic abilities, our minds can deceive us if defilements are still present. We can be fed wrong information by Māra’s faction. Or, even without external influence, our own minds can create illusions because our defilements have not been uprooted.
If we don’t react with equanimity, with a balanced mind that thinks, “I could have been a king, or not; in this life, I am an ordinary person”, we start to construct a false personality. We become intoxicated with the past and begin our own destruction.
Delusion Without Psychic Powers: A Common Pitfall
This phenomenon isn’t limited to advanced meditators. Some people, after only a little meditation and with no psychic abilities whatsoever, start receiving false information.
Thoughts are implanted in their minds: “You were a certain character in a past life.” The list of identities is always the same: a great historical king like Dutugemunu, Parakramabahu, or Walagamba, or a figure from legend like Ravana, Sita, or Mandodari. People are told they were Ravana’s general, his servant, his mother, or his grandfather.
Both Māra and our own minds can inflict this delusion on anyone, regardless of age, gender, race, or religion, who is just beginning their spiritual journey. If we don’t understand this, our spiritual life collapses right there. I have encountered many such individuals.
They get stuck, stagnating in the mud, endlessly repeating, “I am Ravana’s wife,” or “I am King Walagamba.” They become drunk on the past and go nowhere. Sometimes, they even try to meditate with this delusion as their goal, thinking, “I am the next king, I am Diyasena.” As this fantasy intensifies, it can tragically lead to serious mental illness, even hospitalization.
The Trick of False Prophecies
Māra’s deception isn’t just about the past; it’s also about the future. They have fun with us, in a sense. They feed people false prophecies, about Sri Lanka, about the world, about what will happen next. A person might make ten predictions given to them by these forces.
Perhaps two or three come true. The person rejoices in their ‘success,’ ignoring the seven failures. Once Māra’s forces see that this person’s ego is growing, they feed them even more sensational and false predictions about the country and its people.
The person receiving these thoughts doesn’t know their source is Māra. They might claim, “I meditate,” or “I work with a famous deity,” using the name of a respected god. But they cannot discern that the messages are false and sent from a deceptive source.
And they gather followers who, perhaps lacking critical thinking, believe them. They listen to the lies, and even when the predictions fail to come true on the appointed day, they keep following. To be deceived once can happen. But to repeatedly fall into the same hole, day after day, is a result of both foolishness and negative karma (akusala). This is a tragedy we see happening in our country.
The Real and the Illusory: Telling the Difference
So, a question naturally arises: How can we know what information is true on the spiritual path? Are all visions false?
Here is the key. When you receive information through a spiritual faculty, you might have genuinely been that person, like King Parakramabahu. It’s possible. But if that knowledge causes your spiritual life to decline, it is a harmful event. If your ego (māna) inflates, if you feel the need to tell everyone, if your mind constantly replays your royal past, if you are lost in that world, then you know the information is wrong for you. Watch for the signs of decline:
- Your commitment to the five precepts weakens.
- Your celibacy is compromised.
- Your meditation time decreases.
- You revert to your pre-meditation lifestyle.
If these things happen, you must recognize that you have received a false message. Even if you don’t boast outwardly, if you are constantly thinking, “I am King Parakramabahu,” and that pride is growing within you, then you should conclude, “This information is false, and it will destroy me.”
The Response of a Wise Practitioner
Now, what if the information is true? What if you really were a powerful figure in a past life? The wise person’s reaction is completely different. The knowledge does not create an inflated ego or a need to tell others. They see it and think, “Ah, I have taken such births in this long cycle of existence (samsāra).”
They don’t brag about it. Instead, it fuels their determination to continue their solitary spiritual journey with even more diligence. If your mind does not get lost in daydreams, if you are not trapped in a fantasy world, then the information is likely true, and because it is true, you feel no need to cling to it.
A deluded person who thinks he was a king immediately starts looking for his queen. He sees a beautiful woman and deceptively tells her, “You were my consort.” Māra doesn’t even have to do anything more; the person creates his own mess. But the wise person who truly was that king feels no such compulsion.
He might help his former wife if she needs it, or he might simply continue his own practice, focusing only on what is necessary for his liberation. This is the wise course of action.
If you find yourself becoming entangled, know that the message was false. It was either an illusion created by your own mind, a deception sent by Māra’s faction, or a combination of both.
The Ultimate Goal and The Path Forward
With this understanding, you will not be fooled by any message Māra sends. His primary goal is to derail you from the spiritual path. He wants to destroy your virtue and sabotage your meditation. He aims to drag you back into the world of sensual pleasure, of unwholesome deeds, and into his army, ensuring you are reborn in lower realms of suffering. His goal is for you to spread this poison to others during your human life.
What is important is not who you were in the past, but what you are doing in the present, for your country, your people, your religion, the world, and for your own spiritual development. Do not go chasing the past. Do not become attached to visions of former lives or try to ‘fix’ them. That past is meaningless.
We must use the past and present to build a better future, not to get lost in what is gone. Many get lost on side-tracks, even going to meditation teachers who are themselves deluded and lead them astray, especially lay teachers who fall into sensual misconduct with students under the guise of past-life connections. Be aware of these dangers.
The Three Defenses: Wisdom, Mindfulness, and Loving-Kindness
Whether a vision is a true memory, a mental illusion, or one of Mara’s deceptions, the wise person does not get attached. They understand the Buddha’s teaching on the Three Characteristics of Existence: all past phenomena are impermanent (anicca), unsatisfactory, and not-self. There is no need to chase them.
The wise person, guided by the Buddha’s teachings, uses mindfulness. They recognize the attachment or aversion arising and let it go in that very moment. They then continue to develop their practice, their virtue, their meditation, their celibacy, and move to the next stage of the spiritual path.
This is what must be done. For such a person, the illusions from their own mind and the deceptions from Māra’s faction cease. They begin to receive only true information, but because they greet it all with equanimity (upekkhā), a balanced, non-reactive mind, they are never disturbed. Their spiritual progress is assured.
This is why we must use the tools the Buddha gave us, especially the practice of mindfulness as taught in the Four Foundations of Mindfulness (Satipaṭṭhāna). This is what gives rise to wisdom. If you realize you are being targeted by Māra’s forces, you can use another powerful tool: loving-kindness (mettā).
Radiate thoughts of goodwill, “May they be free from hatred, may they be free from anger”, specifically towards those beings. Or simply radiate loving-kindness in all ten directions. As you do this, you will notice the false information begins to fade. If you do this, Māra’s attempts become futile, and eventually, they will leave you alone.
A Final Word of Caution and Encouragement
Once you fall for Mara’s deception, you become his puppet. He can control you directly. That is why you must walk this path with great care and mindfulness. No matter how many things arise to pull you back into attachment, aversion, and the sensual world, meet them with equanimity and wisdom.
Through this article, we wanted to show those developing their meditation, those just starting, and those following various online personalities how easily one can fall prey to these forces.
If your ‘third eye’ is truly developed, you can look at one of these deluded individuals and see the agents of Māra’s army nearby, sometimes five or ten of them, playing their game, twisting that person’s mind until they don’t even know what they are saying. You can see how they place thoughts in the mind, how they cloud it like a black fog.
I trust that with this understanding, the young generation today, so eager to develop their spirituality, will now act with wisdom. I hope you will not be fooled by the fantasies inserted into your mind or by so-called teachers who lack true experience. By understanding that Māra has this role to play, you can avoid his traps and continue your progress.
May the power of the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha, the Triple Gem, bless you to understand these points well and to act with wisdom, mindfulness, and loving-kindness. May the blessings of the Triple Gem be with you all!
We invite you to walk this path with us. Read our teachings, and most importantly, apply them practically in your own life. as you practice, questions will naturally arise. Please feel free to share your experiences and questions in the comments below, via email or contact form. I will do my best to offer guidance in future talks based on your progress. For now, begin this practice with an open heart and a mind free from expectation. Cultivate it correctly, and may you find the clarity and peace you seek.
Thank you for joining us. We hope this blog will be of great benefit to your spiritual journey.
May you all be well and happy.
May the blessings of the Triple Gem be with you all!.
