The End of Bargaining: Milarepa’s Cave and the Silence After Struggle

 

Milarepa sitting calmly before massive cliff-faces shaped as fiery, monstrous demons dissolving around him.

The Cave Filled With Demons

The storm had torn the valley apart that night.
The wind stripped Milarepa’s robe from the drying rock and scattered his firewood across the cliffs.
By morning, the cave was freezing, and he had no flames left to rekindle.
For a moment, a ripple of old despair passed through him—the kind that comes not from circumstances, but from the mind remembering what it once was: frightened, restless, unpurified.

He recognized it immediately.
The storm outside had stirred the storm inside.

Milarepa went out to gather wood.
When he returned, the cave was no longer empty.

Five figures were inside.

One sat calmly on his meditation seat, as if it had always belonged to him.
One flipped through Milarepa’s scriptures as though inspecting the quality of his realization.
Another reclined along the wall, half-smiling, with the lazy arrogance of something that believes it cannot be expelled.
The remaining two whispered among themselves, glancing at him with open mockery.

They were grotesque, but not in any dramatic, cinematic way.
Their true horror was their familiarity.
Each carried a contour of something he knew: a fear, a memory, a hunger, a remnant of old self.

Milarepa felt the tightening—the old instinct:

Fix it. Purify it. Drive it out.

He began with what he knew best.

He sang a song of compassion, praising the local spirits, offering friendship, asking them to leave peacefully.
This was the gentle yogi’s approach: pacify the turbulence of the mind by kindness.

They didn’t move.

He switched to wrathful incantations.
Sharp syllables, fierce mudrās, the full power of tantric command.
The cave rang with the sound of thunderous mantras.
He projected the authority of someone who had conquered demons before.

They grew larger.

He tried teaching them the Dharma.
He explained emptiness, mind-nature, karma, liberation.
He sang verses on impermanence and bodhicitta, hoping the truth would dissolve illusion.

They only stared at him, unblinking, with a deeper and more aggressive presence.

Nothing worked.

The truth hit him then, simple and cold:

Anything he needed to drive away had already defeated him.
Anything he hoped to convert was already his teacher.

The failure was not the demons;
the failure was his resistance.

His strategies were nothing but the ego changing masks—
trying to win, trying to fix, trying to rise above experience,
trying to negotiate spiritual terms with what he didn’t want to face.

At that moment, the cave went silent.

Milarepa felt something he had not felt that entire morning:
a slight loosening.

Not acceptance.
Not resignation.
Something deeper—
a recognition without preference.

He looked at them again.
And suddenly their outlines changed.

They weren’t beings.
They were projections.
Shadows of his own mind, wearing bodies only because he still believed they needed to be solved or purified.

He sat down on the cave floor.
Crossed his legs.
Released the last attempt to manufacture holiness.

Then he spoke—not loudly, not dramatically, simply:

“If you wish to stay, stay.
If you wish to go, go.
There is nothing here I need from you.”

The cave did not shake.
The air did not move.
Nothing mystical happened.

But something in him stopped contracting.

The demons reacted first with confusion.
Then with uncertainty.
Then with fear.

Milarepa stood up, calm as a mountain, and walked directly toward them—
not to attack, not to expel,
but because there was no longer anything to avoid.

As he advanced, they shrank.
The bravest of them collapsed into the next.
The next folded into the next.
Until finally only one remained—huge, dark, towering, the first fear that ever lived in him.

He stepped toward it too.

And as he approached, its outline faltered,
its edges loosened,
and it dissolved like breath fading in cold air.

The cave was empty.

Not purer.
Not holier.
Just empty.

And Milarepa understood:
this emptiness was not a victory over demons.
It was the falling away of the one who needed victory.

He sat down again, in the same cave, on the same earth, in the same cold.
But now the silence had no opposition.

This was the beginning—
not of power,
not of visions,
but of freedom from needing anything to change.

The Last Battlefield Is Inside

The story of Milarepa’s cave is often retold as a myth about demons.
But it is not a story about supernatural beings at all.
It is the description of the moment when the inner path stops being symbolic and becomes existential.

In the early stages of practice, people imagine that their obstacles come from the outside—
from circumstance, from fate, from childhood, from other people, from the world.
Later, they imagine the obstacles are spiritual—lack of blessings, lack of visions, lack of grace.

But Milarepa’s cave shows the truth:

The final demons appear only when there is nowhere left to project.
They arise from inside, because there is nothing left outside to blame.

This is why the last battlefield is the inner landscape itself.

It is not filled with evil.
It is filled with what has not yet been surrendered.

The demons Milarepa met were not “lower forces.”
They were the last residues of his own mind —
the remnants of wanting, fearing, negotiating, controlling.

We all imagine that spiritual maturity means glowing, ascending, or receiving blessings.
But the real sign of ripeness is when the psyche begins to reveal the patterns it could not show earlier because the seeker wasn’t strong enough to meet them.

Early sweetness is protection.
Later bitterness is truth.

This is why the cave appears only after many years of practice.
The mind won’t show its last knots until the seeker has burned through the first layers.

And what does the final knot look like?

It looks like the urge to bargain.

Even at advanced stages, the ego does not disappear—it simply becomes more subtle.
It stops asking for money, status, or praise.
Instead, it asks for spiritual states:

• “Give me peace.”

• “Give me visions.”

• “Give me clarity.”

• “Give me the sign You gave my teacher.”

• “Give me the grace You gave the saints.”

This bargaining is invisible because it looks devotional, humble, sincere.

In reality, it is the last surviving contract with God.

Milarepa’s cave exposes precisely this structure.
Every one of his attempts—chanting, commanding, teaching—was a form of spiritual negotiation.
He wanted the inner world to change.
He wanted the “right” state.
He wanted to return to his meditation seat.

That desire made the demons stronger.

And this is the part people often avoid seeing:
the demons were not blocking his path — his desire for a different experience was blocking it.

The real obstacle was not the fear inside him;
it was his belief that he should not be feeling fear at all.

The demons dissolve the moment he stops bargaining.
Not because surrender is a technique,
but because there is nothing left for the mind to push against.

This is the entrance to the real path —
the moment when the Divine is no longer a vending machine for inner states.

Milarepa’s cave is not a story of triumph.
It is a story of exhaustion.
The exhaustion of strategies, of manipulation, of subtle spiritual greed.

When he says,
“If you wish to stay, stay. If you wish to go, go,”
it is not an act of wisdom.
It is the moment when he runs out of moves.

And only then does he realize the truth:
freedom is not the result of winning against the inner world.
Freedom is the absence of needing it to be different.

This is what makes the story so uncompromising and so rarely understood.

It shows that liberation does not begin with visions.
It begins with the collapse of the need for visions.
It begins when the psyche stops negotiating with God.

And from here, Milarepa becomes a different kind of seeker —
one who does not hunt for divine confirmation,
and therefore cannot be manipulated by his own illusions anymore.

This is the threshold every sincere practitioner eventually reaches—
and the threshold that many never cross,
because the price of admission is the end of spiritual appetite.

The Three Strategies That Always Fail

Before Milarepa recognized the demons as his own mind, he tried three classic approaches.
These are not “mistakes.”
They are the final reflexes of the ego as it tries to preserve itself in spiritual terms.

Every practitioner goes through them.
Most never see that these are not obstacles —
they are the ego’s last survival strategies dressed as spirituality.

Let us name them clearly.

Strategy One — Control

“I will purify this experience.”

This is where he begins:
using mantras, mudrās, and the wrathful authority of the tantric yogin.
He tries to banish the demons, to force them out of the cave.

On the surface, this looks like spiritual power.
Underneath, it is simply the oldest human instinct:

“I do not want this.
I want a different state than the one I am in.”

Control is the ego’s most primitive response.

The modern seeker does the same:

• “I need to calm my mind.”

• “I must fix my fear.”

• “I have to eliminate this thought.”

• “I want to stop suffering.”

But here is the brutal truth:
The desire to ‘fix’ is the oldest demon of all.

Why?

Because it ensures that the ego remains the mediator between “what is” and “what should be.”
As long as the ego is solving problems, it survives.

Control strengthens the demons.

Milarepa discovers this immediately.

Strategy Two — Spiritual Diplomacy

“I will enlighten my demons.”

When force fails, he becomes gentle.
He sings a beautiful, compassionate praise to the local spirits.
He bows to them.
He tries to negotiate their departure.

This strategy is subtler.
It feels spiritual:

• “I will respond with kindness.”

• “I will use love.”

• “I will apply the Dharma to my shadow.”

• “I will soothe my fear.”

But notice the hidden condition:

“If I treat my pain gently, it will go away.”

It is still bargaining.

The ego tries to “teach” the mind into behaving.
It tries to be wise so that the discomfort will leave.

Love is used like a tool.
Compassion is used like a strategy.

This fails too — because it is still resistance wearing a polite face.

The demons grow stronger.

Strategy Three — Holy Explanation

“I will use spiritual truth to get rid of this.”

Now Milarepa tries the highest move:
he preaches emptiness.

He explains the Dharma to the demons themselves:

• all things are mind

• mind is empty

• appearances are illusions

• nothing has inherent existence

This is the ego’s intellectual phase:

• “If I understand this fear, it will disappear.”

• “If I analyze my trauma correctly, I will transcend it.”

• “If I see that everything is empty, I won’t suffer.”

But this is still resistance.

Why?

Because he is using truth as a weapon.
Even the highest teaching becomes another attempt to improve experience.

The ego tries to hide behind insight.

And here the story reaches the most devastating point:

Even Dharma used as escape becomes samsāra.

Understanding does not dissolve the demons.
It only feeds them with more subtle ego.

They grow even more towering.

Why all three strategies fail?

Because all three share the same hidden root:

“I want something other than what is happening.”

Control says:
“I want this gone.”

Diplomacy says:
“I want this transformed.”

Holy explanation says:
“I want this understood.”

In each case, the ego chooses one thing and rejects another.

And this is the very mechanism that keeps the demons alive.

Resistance — even spiritual resistance — is food.

As long as experience must change, the ego survives.
As long as the ego survives, the demons remain.

Milarepa’s cave makes it painfully clear:

Spirituality that tries to improve inner states
is not liberation —
it is ego-management.

This insight is the doorway to the next chapter —
the pivot point where all strategies collapse,
and the mind discovers a fourth stance that is not a strategy at all.

A stance so simple that seekers overlook it for years.

 The Pivot: Recognition Without Preference

After the failure of all strategies, something breaks inside Milarepa.

Not a breakdown.
A breaking open.

The moment is quiet, almost unremarkable.
There is no new light, no divine voice, no surge of mystical power.
What collapses is not the demons —
what collapses is the attempt to do anything about them.

For the first time, Milarepa looks at the demons without a plan.

He does not want them to leave.
He does not want them to stay.
He does not want peace.
He does not want purity.
He does not want a better meditation state.
He does not want a spiritual victory.

He simply looks.

It is this non-interference
— this clean, unflinching recognition without preference —
that changes everything.

Because preference is the root of the ego.

When he stops preferring a different experience:

• fear loses its target

• desire loses its hunger

• memory loses its sting

• trauma loses its solidity

• the inner world loses its threat

And the demons lose their nourishment.

They depend on the dual movement of the mind:
yes, no
grasping, rejecting
wanting, resisting

Without these movements, they cannot exist.

This is the heart of the pivot:

The demons are not entities.
They are the echo of the mind’s refusal to be with what is.

When refusal ends, they have no ground.

Milarepa does not suddenly “see emptiness.”
He simply stops trying to reach emptiness.

And in that non-reach, emptiness reveals itself by default.

It is not a mystical vision.
It is the natural state of everything when nothing is being manipulated.

This is why, across traditions, teachers say things like:

• “When nothing is done, all is accomplished.”

• “The effort is the obstacle.”

• “Non-doing is the highest doing.”

• “When preference ceases, freedom appears.”

These are not poetic slogans.
They are precise descriptions of what happened in that cave.

Milarepa realizes that the demons are not a problem.
His relationship to them is the problem.
The demand for a different inner state is the problem.
The subtle bargaining with God —
‘If I practice well, You will remove my suffering’ —
is the problem.

When the bargaining stops, the dynamic collapses.

This is why the decisive moment is so simple:

Milarepa doesn’t defeat the demons.
He doesn’t subdue them.
He doesn’t convert them.
He doesn’t transcend them.

He steps forward without wanting anything.

The demons begin to dissolve
not because he has become strong,
but because he has become transparent.

There is no longer a “Milarepa” to oppose them.

The sense of a separate self —
the one who wants, the one who fears, the one who practices —
has loosened.

The mind stops negotiating with experience.

And experience stops being an adversary.

This is the gateway to the next stage —
the most frightening and liberating moment:
the fearless welcome.

The Fearless Welcome: “Stay or Go as You Please”

When recognition without preference stabilizes, something extraordinary and paradoxical happens:

Fear remains, but the one who is afraid dissolves.
Pain remains, but the one who resists it loosens.
Thoughts remain, but the one who believes them loses density.
The world remains, but the center of demand disappears.

This is the moment in the story where Milarepa does something that does not look like a spiritual act at all.

He simply sits down in front of his demons and says:

“If you wish to stay, stay.
If you wish to go, go.”

These are not words of surrender in the devotional sense.
They are the words of someone who has run out of argument, negotiation, and spiritual ambition.

He is not offering hospitality.
He is not trying to be kind.
He is not trying to impress the demons with his equanimity.
He is not attempting a yogic technique.

There is no intention behind the gesture.

That is precisely why it works.

The demons are creatures of tension.
They feed on reaction —
on attraction, on aversion, on subtle spiritual hunger.

The moment he stops producing that fuel, their outlines waver.

He stands up and walks toward them.

Not bravely.
Not dramatically.
Not as a hero.

Just because there is nothing left inside him that needs distance.

Approach replaces resistance.

This is the single most truthful movement a human being can make toward their inner world:

to walk toward what they used to fear,
without needing the fear to disappear.

The demons shrink into each other.
The last one stands before him like a mountain of shadow,
the root-fear that has followed him since childhood,
the remnant of loneliness, hunger, grief, and old identity.

He approaches that one too.

And it collapses.

Because the one who needed protection
is gone.

This is the moment of uncompromised freedom —
not the freedom from experience,
but the freedom from the demand that experience be different.

Nothing magical happens in the cave.

The world does not brighten.
The air does not change.
There is no revelation, no bliss, no divine approval.

Milarepa is not rewarded for surrender.
He is simply no longer divided from what is.

And this is the deepest truth:

The demons were not obstacles on the path.
They were the path revealing the last place where he was still bargaining.

Once that bargaining ended,
the distinction between “me” and “the demons,”
between “the yogi” and “the experience,”
between “the seeker” and “God,”
collapsed.

This is not disillusionment.

This is adulthood of the soul.

Freedom begins not when fear ends,
but when the need for reassurance dies.

Why Traditions Hide the Real Path

Spiritual traditions rarely speak honestly about what the path demands.
They offer beauty first —
scriptures glowing with the promise of paradise,
visions of celestial realms,
deities showering light,
stories of saints dissolving in bliss.

These are not lies.
They are exquisite half-truths,
placed at the beginning of the road so that frightened beings will take the first step.

If you read the opening pages of almost any tradition, the pattern is the same:

• Goloka is overflowing with līlā and sweetness.

• Eternal ananda awaits the surrendered heart.

• Heaven is radiant, untouched by sorrow.

• Liberation is endless joy, free of all suffering.

• The devotee will be embraced, cherished, lifted into divine love.

These images are not mistakes.
They are medicine.

Because if people were told what the path actually requires —
the dismantling of identity,
the collapse of control,
the encounter with inner demons,
the abandonment of spiritual bargaining,
the walk into emptiness without reward —
no one would come.

Grace uses beauty as bait.

This is not manipulation in the human sense.
It is the organic compassion of the universe.
No being will voluntarily undergo the surgery of ego-dissolution unless it is first softened by sweetness.

This is why the early phase of the path is filled with:

• consoling visions

• sense of connection

• spiritual warmth

• the intoxicating idea of belonging

• the dream of divine tenderness

• the fantasy of endless bliss in heavenly realms

These are the anesthetics.

They are given at the beginning because the operation cannot be done on a fully conscious ego.
The ego must be lulled, comforted, seduced, reassured.

Only then can the knife begin its work.

This is why the texts speak so softly:

• Surrender, and God will take care of you.

• Chant this name, and all sorrow will vanish.

• Devote yourself, and divine love will surround you.

• Offer your heart, and God will remove your burdens.

Each sentence is a kind of necessary fiction —
not false in essence, but incomplete.
These promises describe only the doorway, not the house.

Because the real transformation begins not when God embraces you,
but when God disappears as an “Other.”

Traditions rarely say this loudly.
They guard the deeper truth behind layers of metaphor and secrecy.
It appears only in the later teachings, when the student is strong enough to hear it:

• that Goloka and ananda are symbols,
  not destinations

• that visions are thresholds,
  not arrival points

• that the sweetness of the divine mother
  gives way to the stillness of the void

• that the path does not lead toward fullness,
  but through emptiness

• that what we call “grace” is often the removal
  of everything we clung to as holy

Every tradition knows that real liberation begins where consolation ends.
But this cannot be said at the gate.
The beginner must believe the path is gentle, predictable, full of light.

So traditions place the carrot at the beginning.
They describe heaven, bliss, love, fulfillment.
They speak of protection, guidance, miracles, tenderness.

Without that, no one would start.

No one volunteers for ego annihilation.
No one walks willingly into the cave filled with their own demons.
No one rushes toward Mahāśūnya without the earlier memory of sweetness to sustain them.

And so the path is structured like this:

First — divine anesthesia.
Then — divine surgery.

This is why Guruji Amritananda’s early visions were radiant.

They were not the climax of his path;
they were the preparation for the collapse that would come later.

He was shown the Goddess in form
so that he could bear the moment when She withdrew form entirely.

His disciples focus on the carrot.
They meditate on the visions, the sweetness, the blessings.
They forget that the greatest grace came at the end —
when She removed the roles,
the temple,
the identity,
the story,
the spiritual persona itself.

Traditions hide this because most people cannot digest it early.
They would run away.

But Milarepa’s cave, Guruji’s late years, all point to the same truth:

The Divine first lures you with presence.
Later, She liberates you through absence.

This is not a betrayal.
It is compassion in its most unadorned form.

And when a seeker matures enough to see this clearly,
the tone of their entire path shifts —
from longing for experience
to intimacy with whatever is.

When Nothing Must Change

The story of Milarepa in the cave is not a legend about demons.
It is a map of the moment when the spiritual path stops revolving around visions and promises, and begins to revolve around truth.

Every seeker starts with longing —
for God, for grace, for reassurance, for a sign that devotion is seen and answered.
Traditions know this, and so they begin with sweetness.
The carrot is placed at the entrance not to deceive but to protect.

Without early beauty, no one would walk far enough to meet themselves.

But the real path begins only when the seeker is mature enough to see that what they were pursuing was never the point.
Visions dissolve.
Inner theatrics quiet down.
The hunger for divine confirmation fades.
The longing for “higher states” loses urgency.

This is the transition that few recognize:

Freedom begins not when fear disappears,
but when the demand for a different experience collapses.

Milarepa discovered this the hard way.
His demons did not vanish because he attained power.
They vanished because the one who needed them gone was no longer there.

The same principle governs every authentic path:

• What resists, expands.

• What is manipulated, persists.

• What is bargained with, gains strength.

• What is welcomed without preference, dissolves.

The Divine appears in form to draw the seeker forward.
The Divine withdraws form to free the seeker from seeking.
Both movements are grace.

And the deepest blessing is not a vision, a voice, or a sign.
It is the quiet shift in which the heart no longer waits for any of them.

When nothing must change,
the cave is empty.

When the cave is empty,
the seeker is finally at home —
not in Goloka,
not in ananda,
not in visions or absence of visions,
but in the simple, undivided presence of what is.

This is the end of bargaining.
This is the end of fear.
This is the end of the search.

Not because something was gained,
but because nothing more is required.

Here the path falls silent.

And the silence itself is the teaching.