Mara. Spelt MARA. Within your mind, you've got two parts. You got an intelligent wise part, and a very clever ignorant part. Okay the clever ignorant part in Buddhism, is given a personified name, Mara. Mara is our ignorance. Mara wants to trick us, Mara wants us to suffer, Mara is going to tell us we are a jerk, Mara is going to give us all our self-pity, Mara is going to ignite our anger.
The wisdom side, for some reason, has no extra name besides "me". Maybe that's because the Buddha wants us to identify with the wisdom side. It doesn't need another name, that's me. That's the side we want. That's the side that is going to develop compassion, develop patience and develop forgiveness.
We have a battle going on. We have a strong battle in the mind going on. We've got wisdom and ignorance. So by actually personifying Mara, giving it a name helps us to have a little distance from it. It allows us to treat it as not me, no longer am I going to identify with all that, that's somebody else. Now in that way, when you are actually doing your practice, say you're walking back and forth, and all of a sudden you're thinking some negative thoughts towards somebody over there, they have some funny pants or something and you're getting caught up in aversion towards their pants. As soon as you become aware, you can note aversion, aversion and come back as we teach. You could also reflect, "ahh Mara. That's Mara catching me again" and then you come back, so the more often you do that the less you are going to attach to the ignorant part of your mind.