Mind viruses and demons are real

You're more programmable than you think

Cross-posted from Twitter, but the version here contains hyperlinks to relevant material for a better reading experience.

My charisma essay has been going around again, and a lot of new people have subscribed. If you’re new: Hello! Thanks for following along. To be honest, the reception made me nervous. I wondered if I’d set an expectation to keep talking about the same topics like relationships or social dynamics. There are plenty of Substacks talking about those already, and I don’t want to stick to a single theme since I have various interests.

This essay is in part a response to that: it’s a weed out mechanism for people who may be mistaken about what they signed up for. If you came because of my charisma essay *and* you like this, you will probably enjoy sticking around.

This post was written while listening to the Caroline Polachek Tiny Desk Concert.

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Photo I took at the bookstore this week

(Trigger warning: mentions of horror imagery, abuse, suicide)

I'm pretty sure mind viruses are real. I've been doing a lot of reading recently, specifically poetry, and wanted to check out Anne Sexton. Her 1966 poetry collection called Live or Die won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, so clearly very famous and critically acclaimed. Before reading, I looked into her bio and found out she lived a pretty sad life and died by suicide, but thought hey, that's not too uncommon for creatives and sad people can make good art too, let's read it anyway and see what happens.

The writing was good but I found the book disturbing. The way she writes is haunting. It disturbed me so deeply that night I had nightmares (I usually never have nightmares, the worst I get is stress dreams of mundane scenarios like standing in line at the store and a clerk is mad at me, or waking up late for a test because I still think I'm in school). I spent the whole next day aimless and depressed, unable to deeply read anything. I suspect the book installed some kind of mind virus that infected me. That same day I had a headache with light sensitivity (not related to the book) so I lied in the dark, and when I closed my eyes I saw horror images, like clowns and jumpscare faces you'd find on 4chan—decaying faces, staring at me, smiling, apathetic. I don't consume any horror content and I don't even have a fear of clowns, but they popped up anyway.

So I'm like, oh, I see now, demons are definitely real, and they very much exist in the mind, and I've got a case of them here. I tried a variety of tricks to get rid of them. Clearing the images away, replacing them with positive images like angels, and praying to God, but they wouldn't leave, and the fear only intensified as none of the tricks were working...so I had the idea to conjure the feeling of love, metta. And the images started melting away, because demons feed on fear, but they don't know what to do if I love them. It really is a powerful force.

Poetry can be a direct transmission of what's in one's mind, heart, and soul. And I glimpsed into something I should not have. After I warded off the demons, I read some Mary Oliver, which soothed me a bit, because her poems feel like praying; she talks about nature and delightful things. But I wasn't able to read easily for the rest of the day, all day actually, because my body was afraid—it was rejecting it for fear of contracting another virus. This would fortunately fade by the next day and I would be able to read again.

So now I think demons are real, and Anne Sexton was probably one, or possessed in some way, and she suffered from this most of all, which is probably why she killed herself. I don't make this claim lightly, and I am certainly not saying it's her "fault" she had or experienced a dark nature. Reading more into her biography, I learned she suffered incestuous abuse as a child and went on to molest her own daughter. She had bipolar and started writing at the recommendation of her doctor, who thought a creative outlet would help her cope. She was friends with Sylvia Plath, who famously killed herself, after which Sexton wrote a poem called "Sylvia's Death" which was mostly sweet but also full of jealousy that Plath managed to kill herself before she could. Sexton's daughter, the one she abused, would also go on to attempt suicide as an adult but fortunately survive. Even after being fully aware of how her mother had harmed her, and making promises to her own children that she wouldn't kill herself and leave them the way her mother did, she still succumbed to the impulse. Because demons and mind viruses are transmissible—across time, space, and generations. Their impact can be felt even after their hosts/sources are gone because they live in our minds, and if you have a mind you're susceptible, the way anyone with a body and immune system can encounter a virus.

To be honest, I'm not sure if we should be widely celebrating and promoting the works of people who killed themselves. Obviously, not all suicidal people produce dark or disturbing work, and even if they do, there are people who feel cathartically seen and helped by such things. The work can also, by all critical standards, be *good*. People are unevenly affected by stimuli. I saw and contracted something from her work that her huge literary fanbase simply didn't seem to. If they reacted to her work the way I did, it would not be shared. They would feel an almost moral imperative not to share it, like one does with an infohazard, but instead she's attained a legendary status in American poetry. I walked into a bookstore yesterday, and there it was: a collection of her poems, its cover turned to face me, on the shelf right below Mary Oliver's Devotions. I swear, the universe mocks me sometimes.

I want to note that not all mind viruses are bad—only that you are more susceptible than you think, and you should be very careful what media you consume because it could be influencing you in ways that are not obviously apparent. "Mind virus" is the larger category referring to transmissible entities that enter us and seem to have lives and agendas of their own. They transform us to do their bidding because they want to survive and spread. In Sexton's case, it looks like a chain of abuse and suicides. But there are good ones too, like dharma and metta and forgiveness, and there are packaged versions in Buddhism or Christianity which have survived thousands of years and harbor wisdom and reliable defenses against the dark arts. These can, when practiced in earnest, melt away trauma and trigger genuine personal transformation, *and spread to transform others as well for the better*. I think that's incredible.

If we are more porous and programmable than we think, this is actually news for celebration. Because it means you can change your life trajectory, personality, imagination, relationships, and pretty much anything with the right inputs and feedback loops. For example, if you listened to dharma talks every day for the next year I bet your baseline nervous system activation would be much lower, and you'd probably be more loving, open, and peaceful by the end of it.

You can do anything with the help of the right kind of mind viruses. Just be careful out there, because the world is teeming with them, and you can't always tell which ones are friendly.

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Side note: I didn't want to include this in the main body of the essay, but the story of how Sexton got the Pulitzer in 1967 is amusing. The three judges that year were all previous Pulitzer winners themselves, and during deliberation they each ranked the six candidates. Sexton was dead last on two of the three lists, but because they wildly disagreed on who should actually get the Prize, she won by default. This made her career and is the reason why she's widely celebrated, and why I was curious about her work in the first place. Learning this made me trust the Pulitzer less, but those particular judges a bit more. Otherwise, I'd just be depressed thinking they were regularly pushing demons onto the bestseller lists.