May-June 2000

From an interview with Dr. Yeshi Dhonden, author of Health through Balance.

Dr. Dhonden, how does a spirit make a person sick?

How that happens, generally speaking, is you have various types of spirits, could also be nagas – the same kind of thing – and the spirit harms you with their mind. The spirit directs malevolent thoughts to the body, and that’s enough to create illness.

Nagas dwell in various places like springs, also sometimes in groves of forests and other places. Especially in the case of forest glens or in springs, if someone comes and pollutes the spring or starts cutting down trees that are actually the lodgings of nagas, they can harm you. But in such a case, it’s really up to a lama – and I am not implying that I’m a lama in this particular case – then it’s up to a lama to perform a divination to really find out what kind of spirit influence it is, to identify that. It’s primarily up to the lama to determine what type of ritual practices, etc. need to be done to counteract that influence.

So if it’s a lama who is diagnosing or trying to determine what type of spirit influence is afflicting the individual, that’s how the lama will do a divination. If it’s a doctor, the way the doctor proceeds is to do a special kind of diagnosis of the urine, unlike the normal one for normal illnesses involving imbalance of the various humors. By analyzing the urine, the doctor will be able to tell what type of spirit is involved, and that would indicate what kind of countermeasures need to be taken.

In Health through Balance there are some references to that, exactly the types of patterns or designs in the urine that one needs to be able to analyze.

Dr. Dhonden, how do spirits make people’s minds crazy?

There are different types of spirits. This is a particular type of spirit, an “insane-maker”; the way they would afflict a person mentally is by a kind of possession where the mind of this entity kind of merges with the mind of the patient. And when that happens, when that kind of possession takes place, then the person who is so afflicted, to use a vernacular term, acts crazy.

But their own mind isn’t crazy, it’s the mind of the spirit?

The person’s mind is affected, it’s not simply behavior. The person’s mind is affected, because it’s been, in a way, fused or mingled with the mind of this kind of malevolent entity, such that the person’s mind is never at rest; it’s always agitated, it’s always disturbed, which then manifests in crazy behavior.

When a person is possessed by a spirit and harms others, let’s say, do they create negative karma or is it just the spirit who creates karma?

It is not the case that the person is free of any kind of negative karma because they were under the influence of whatever this entity was. You can say spirit influence itself is the result of karma from the person’s previous lives, namely the karma of killing. And so because they have that habitual propensity for killing when they were vulnerable to this, the cycle continued. But they do not get off scot-free, karmically speaking.

A second type of spirit is called “forget-maker.” The first one is an “insane-maker” and the second one is a “forget-maker.” It’s a kind of dementia. How it manifests behaviorally is the person is demented to the point of being absolutely unresponsive, just sits, shows no indication of seeing, hearing, is utterly uncommunicative.

And there’s a third type and this is a mommo spirit who makes one “happy.” When this kind of spirit possesses an individual, the person becomes hysterical, just laughing for no reason, laughing uncontrollably for no reason whatever. Again, it’s a kind of mental derangement.

There’s a fourth type of spirit, which is called a roving spirit, and when you’re possessed by a roving spirit, you rove; you just can’t sit still, you’re always on the move, you’re always busy, you’re always just moving from hither and yon, and you can never just be at rest. InTibet, when you see a person who just can’t settle down, people would say jokingly, “Oh, this person must be possessed by a roving spirit.”

Dr. Dhonden, would you think that the majority of people who are called mentally ill are actually possessed by spirits?

No. Most of the mentally ill in theUSA, for example, are not due to spirit or demonic possession, but rather, in most cases, it’s because of an imbalance of the life-sustaining wind in their heart. The imbalance is here, that’s very common. It will manifest in various ways of mental illness, including depression, insomnia, crying, etc. And in many cases, Tibetan medicine is helpful for that, because there’s no spirit involved: it’s just a straight balancing out of the humors once again.

All the people who hear voices, are they possessed by spirits?

In cases like that, when people hear voices or they actually see apparitions, see demonic apparitions and the like, then that usually is a result of some kind of a spirit possession. For example, a woman patient came to me fromFlorida, and she saw hallucinations. She saw demons, and they made her very unhappy; her mind was very ill at rest. In her case, I gave her an image of Vajrapani and gave her medication. The two of those together helped her a lot.