A story about entities from Tibetan buddhism

In a forum like this, partly thanks to the DMT/ketamine axis of evil, there is generally an awareness of "entities" or whatever you want to call it. There is also usually a wide range of different beliefs about what's "really" going on. There are the die-hard materialists, who will talk about the parietal lobe and projected identity, and there are the die-hard spiritualists, who will take every entity at the same face value they take their taxi driver. My feelings and thoughts about this have been heavily informed by a story I heard from Tibetan buddhism last year.

I was at a weekend of talks by Robin Kornman, a senior student of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who was one of the first of the Tibetan buddhist masters to come teach in the West. (Robin died a few months ago of cancer, I feel really sad I didn't get more of a chance to get to know him.) Robin was talking about "drala" or "the dralas", which is similar to Japanese Shinto "kami" or Native American totem spirits. Think spirits of a place or of an animal, a guardian or some such thing. Not gods, but, you know, entities. At first Robin was talking about drala in a metaphorical way, as if it were just the particular self-consistent feeling of a place, or the tendencies of something. But he would also talk about "the dralas" and how they would come sometimes. Sort of wavering back and forth between whether they were metaphorical or real, and we were getting confused, and eventually someone asked him "Wait a minute, are the dralas supposed to be real, or is this just a metaphor??"

He laughed and said he asked Rinpoche that question once, and learned that you can't ask a Buddhist master whether something is real and expect to get a straight answer.

"Rinpoche, are the dralas real?" he asked. "They're as real as you are", said Rinpoche.

"Then, how real am I?"

"Not real at all."

So that's how I think about entities...