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REALMS
are six different styles of acceleratiion or deceleration. " |
In 1993 His Holiness the Dalai Lama said that he no longer believed in the existence of the six realms [in the Wheel of Life] as actual locations. Maybe now we can all relax. Maybe now we can explore this subject in terms of our own patterns and projections. This might offend the more traditionally minded; however, from whatever position you may wish to adopt - even from the point of view in which the six realms are actual locations - it needs to be understood that they are all contained within each other. Even from the medieval point of view there are six realms within each of the six realms and so on into infinity. That's the bad news. Merely being human doesn't make my rebirth a 'precious human rebirth' - it rather depends on whether I entrench myself in conditioning, or whether I allow my constructs to be challenged. However, there is some good news: you don't have to die physically to be reborn and gain a precious human rebirth. This can be attained at any moment - by recognising that we're trapped in a web of patterns; and that at the very least, we're ambivalent about whether we want to remain with those patterns or not. I don't believe that any of you have actually come here to learn how to see reality in terms of a medieval Indian model, however quaint or colourful that might be. For example, according to Indian cosmology, there is some kind of paradisical venue called 'the god realm'. Then there's 'the hell realm' - a scenario in which all kinds of horrific torture and unimaginable pain are taking place. These worlds, as distinct locations, are not very useful to those who have already been introduced to hell in childhood - by whatever means . . . But as models of mind-states, the six realms are actually very useful indeed. Hell is actually here and now. You don't have to look very far to find it either. You only have to look at the newspaper to find hell. You only have to look at the advertisements to find the god realm [laughs], or at least the insinuation that it's possible to coax it into existence . . . I would like to explore with you what these six realms actually are in terms of human experience - because they are actually very real. They are totally alive in all of us, in terms of different ways of reacting, or conjuring with duality. They are different speed settings on the circular self-defeating mechanism of samsara. Hell is a state where, in an attempt to avoid pain, you cause yourself as much pain as possible. We can witness hell happening in the world. It's in the news and in the streets every day. It's taking place all the time. Hell, in the Buddhist sense, is subdivided, like a mall or a department store - we can select our torture in excruciating varieties. We get to use all our credit cards with impunity, because in hell . . . buying and paying back are instantaneous. We pay for pain with pain; and there's always more pain in the account to pay for as much pain as anyone wants to buy. There are a lot of different types of hell; but mainly, they divide into the hot and cold hells. The hot hell, being the worst type, is where we're in so much pain that we lash out at everything. But in lashing out, we only succeed in hurting ourselves further. And the more we hurt ourselves, the more we lash out. It's as if you were being boiled alive . . . apart from the fact that you're not being boiled alive - it simply seems that way. Then, as soon as you get used to being boiled, the bottom falls out of the cauldron and the next boiling cauldron is a hundred thousand percent hotter. This hell condition is one in which the experiential situation becomes so intense that the only response to it is to create further intensity. The intensity feeds on itself and becomes searing . . . then it becomes more searing . . . then it becomes more searing . . . and just when you think that it can't get any more searing . . . it gets more searing! The more searingly intense it becomes, the more intense the response has to be. We're battling with our own intensity, but we don't realise it. We feel as if it's the outside world with which we're battling. You feel that the intensity is on the outside coming toward you, rather than that you're creating it. It's a situation of intense paranoia. It's a situation of intense fear. 'Hell' is when our reaction to intrinsic space becomes highly claustrophobic. Everything becomes a threat. Anger is projected onto the outside world and it reflects back. We react to our environment as if it were hostile, and immediately it becomes hostile. Q Can you get to this place through any of the five elements in terms of obscuration? NR Well . . . from one perspective, you could say that hell is the result of an intensification of the water element neurosis, the result of anger. Anger is the root of the hell realm, but really all the elements manifest within it. You can't really split the six realms into locations according to element because they all contain all of them. Q So . . . the claustrophobia of hell is all this shit coming at you from all directions? NR Indeed . . . to use a fecal analogy . . . It's when it hits the fan - all of it, the consequence of every samsaric bowel movement you've ever had in all your past lives. How hard it hits depends on the speed at which the neurotic element patterns are cycling. With hell it's not just experienced as the tepidly evacuated feces of day to day frustration; it's molten burning feces - but it might not actually be there at all . . . It's merely that we might perceive it as being there. It may appear as if it's coming at us from all directions, because we're throwing it. Q So everything we look at poses a threat, because we perceive the phenomena of our experience as threatening? NR Yes. We react with aggression to protect ourselves, but our aggression simply creates more fear and more threat. We begin to treat everything as a threat; and whatever we treat as a threat, becomes a threat. The world begins to reciprocate our fear and aggression in more and more overt ways. Q Can you give an example, Rinpoche? NR Well . . . I think someone is going to do or say something to hurt me - so I act towards them in such a way that they start wanting to do something to hurt me. In this case the aggression might not have been there in the other person; I may have just created it out of my own paranoia. If I have a feeling that someone doesn't really like me, and start to act toward them in a suspicious manner . . . if I continually over-react to any slight jest with hostility - whoever it is, is probably going to start disliking me. So . . . I have this sense of my own reality and I project that personal reality onto life. And then . . . life starts to reflect it back to me. Hell is when that process becomes a closed loop. Then the closed loop becomes a tourniquet . . . Hell, isn't it? But we've all been there in one shape or form. It's when you trip over and hurt yourself, and you feel as if life has done it to you on purpose, so you hit the wall with your fist or kick a hole in the back door and hurt yourself further. Then you get distracted by the pain and bring your head up under the cupboard door that you left open. The sharp corner gashes your forehead and a trickle of blood runs down onto your clean white shirt - the only clean shirt you have left, and you're supposed to be going to a business meeting. You try to sponge it off but the dishcloth is full of coffee grounds and now you've got a massive brown espresso stain. You rip the shirt off to wash it but you do it with such violence that you tear it. Then in utter frustration and incredible fury you smash your head through the window and end up having to go to casualty to get stitched up [general laughter apart from Ngakpa Rinpoche who doesn't even smile]. Actually, this really happens. A man told me this story about himself - people really do this kind of thing. Then . . . there's the cold hell. In the hot hell, there's a frantic and frenzied lashing out; but in the cold hell you become catatonic - completely and utterly frozen. You become exhausted. You cannot fight anymore. You just lie there almost paralysed and inert. To some degree pain has become the norm, and so however terrible it may be, it has some quality of infinite duration that lets you know very clearly that you've lost. There's no winning at all. At this point it becomes possible to slump onto the ground, even though the ground itself is full of pain and fear. This is a lesser degree of psychological pain where you just don't move, because any kind of movement is going to cause more pain, even the movement of your paranoid mind-moments. Any kind of openness to any possibility of anything at all simply shuts down. You shut down from all possibilities because all possibilities contain pain. You cut yourself off from your own projections of pain by refusing to move. The projection remains, but you cease to interact with it. The pain appears to be 'out there' and you can either attempt to fight with it or not. So you choose not to fight, because fighting merely causes pain. With the hot hell the pain seems to be encroaching without any kind of remission, so you have to attack it - as you would if you were being boiled alive. But with the cold hell the pain simply sits there staring at you like a beast of prey. It's just there . . . a vast brooding presence. It cannot be escaped; you can only contract into yourself. The pain has become a static landscape in which you are frozen and motionless. It's still pain, but there's worse pain out there, that can be escaped by avoiding all interaction. There could possibly be better positions you could adopt, but you're never sure if other positions just contain worse pain. Q Is this the pain of isolation? NR Any kind of pain at all really. But this is largely the pain of not being able to cope with anything. Because however you try to cope causes pain. Q Can that be physical as well? NR Yes. But physical pain happens as a result of our painful projections. Naturally if you're in a state where something really horrible is happening to you, and you get so completely frightened by it that you start lashing out at everyone, then that is going to cause you physical pain in the end. Or if you're in physical pain, and you actually thrash out; you rip the skin off your hands, and have to be restrained. You're actually lashing out in order to fight off pain, but in the attempt to escape pain, you end up with more pain. Not only do you have the physical pain of whatever your condition happens to be; but, you also have your bleeding knuckles where you've been punching the wall. These realms are all either greater or lesser experiences of pain. They are the process of the dualistically distorted elements as self-defeating cycles, either speeding up or slowing down. The most terrible hot hell is 'instant karma', and the god realms are interminably deferred karma. With the god realms the self-defeating cycles of the dualistically distorted elements are very, very slow. You don't experience any repercussions in terms of how you are for a long, long, long time. In the lower realms you experience these repercussions faster and faster. The six realms are six versions of the five cyclic elemental neuroses. They cycle faster or slower depending on the degree of intensity of your commitment to proving that you're: solid; permanent; separate; continuous; and, defined. In the god realm the elemental cycles are enormously protracted. In hell the elemental cycles are practically instantaneous. In looking at the elements, it's crucial to understand how it is that they undermine themselves. Q Can you give an example? NR Well, say you see this very, very nice thing in a shop. You lust after it, because it's the most fabulous whatever that you've ever seen. What makes it so delicious is that you can't really quite afford it. So you have to think about it a lot. You have to think about how much more perfect your life would be if you had this wonderful thing. The more you think about it, the more wonderful it seems, and the drabber your life seems without it. So you save up for it. You cut back on your expenditure in certain ways, or you just go wild with your charge card and hang the consequences [laughs]. You go and get it. Then it's yours! But as soon as it's yours . . . it's not quite the same. You want it because you feel some kind of fundamental isolation inside yourself, and you need to unify with some focus of comforting or lascivious proximity . . . You want to unify with this object of desire; but as soon as you have it - it disappears. It disappears because you own it - it has entered your world and has therefore become you, or become part of you. What made it so desirable was that it was not you; it was other. So as soon as you draw it into your world - vvvvvttt - it's gone. But it does take a little while for it to disappear. At first it's a joyful thing - the leather jacket; the cowboy boots; the car; the lover; the bagel; the leopard-skin pillbox hat; the Buddhist book; the Irish wolf-hound; the Gieves and Hawk shooting coat; the Mississippi gambler's vest; the .44 Colt Anaconda; or whatever it is. You're in blissful union with it, you're dancing jubilantly with it, but after a while it just merges back into the grey nondescript fabric of daily appearances. It lasts for a period of time, then it 'disappears'. In the hell realm everything is instantly gone. As soon as you have anything at all, it's gone - and it bites you savagely as it goes! It disappears immediately it's glimpsed and leaves you with emotional third-degree burns. The aching need for any thread of respite is a tortured craving that is punished continuously in the cruellest possible manner. All hope disintegrates immediately in its arising. Every possibility of alleviation of pain is brutally crushed. With each of the elements that function in the hell realm the self-undermining process speeds up to an unendurable pitch, in which there is no option but endurance. And the endurance is a continuous battle in an attempt to suffer less, even for a fraction of a second. In the hot hell it becomes terminal velocity. So these six realms are six different styles of acceleration or deceleration. Q Is there a 'why', to why they speed up? NR Certainly. Speeding up is caused by struggling - by fighting reality in order to suffer less, or in the attempt to return to some lost peace or pleasure. Slowing down is caused by relaxing - by giving up the fight with reality, and letting go of the need to regain anything. Struggling causes acceleration; relaxation causes deceleration. And that choice always exists in the moment. When you have a situation, you can either react to it in terms of trying to manipulate it or control it, or you can go [sigh] okay I'm not going to react to this with my first idea. I'm not going to break your nose for asking this question. This is immediately what I want to do but I'm not going to do that, I'm going to sit with it for a while, and I might even give up my response. That's a thing that is always there. The way that one moves between the realms is always through struggling, which means manipulating or trying to control; or relaxing and accepting the situation, actually giving the situation space. The idea of acceptance isn't always quite so helpful. Because it sounds like the way to improve, or the way to become liberated is that you just accept everything that happens. Maybe a better word than acceptance is allowing space. You might decide to act on something, but you might not act immediately. The desire to act immediately on something that you feel is threatening is always out of habit, because that's the first thing that comes up. You know: this arises so I destroy it; I've got to get rid of this threat. You can't say, well maybe this isn't a threat. Or maybe it's a threat that is okay. Maybe this person is asking me a question and it sounds threatening but maybe I can answer it. As soon as you have a 'maybe', there's space. When it's definite: 'This is an attack on me, I'm just going to destroy this person, I'm not going to answer this person, I'm going to humiliate the person instead so that they won't ask me another question.' There's that quality there of vvvvtttt! It's just there - and that instantaneous response may be very close to an aspect of realisation. You could say it's like spontaneity. But it's the total opposite of spontaneity: it happens immediately but it's not spontaneity, it's complete claustrophobic habit. There's no space in which there could be any other possibility. So saying 'maybe' or 'I wonder what this is' or 'how should I respond to this' - all those reactions are straightaway a space in which you can feel what you're feeling and you can have a choice of how you're going to react to that. This happens all the way up and down these realms. So that's the hot hell and the cold hell. Then there's the hungry ghost realm. These realms are a lot easier to understand when you view them in terms of acceleration and deceleration. So now we're decelerating. What happens takes longer to come back. The hungry ghost state arises out of the cold hell. You eventually have to relax from the position of being frozen, or of maintaining rigidity. You relax because you can no longer relate to how you are maintaining your rigidity. When you relax out of the hot hell you stop lashing out and as soon as you stop lashing out you feel better. But then you freeze, because you dare not move lest you provoke that ever-escalating intensity again. You don't venture into any other fields of experience that present themselves, because they all look like pain. So you freeze everything in order to survive. You maintain the tension of that frozen state by refusing to move even if there's a good possibility that some situation might be preferable. You don't move into it because you've learnt that freezing keeps you safe. Naturally it's an effort to remain frozen, because opportunities are always arising. The enlightened state is always flashing through, even in hell! And whenever this happens one has the opportunity to respond - to move or cooperate with it. When you relax in that sense of opportunity, something new always opens up. It always starts out feeling like a big risk. But when you first sense that there is some opportunity that seems more nurturing, you enter into the hungry ghost realm. You taste something different and become very hungry for positive experience. The problem is that it's a completely self-obsessed state. You have no interest or respect for what you're going for; you just want to devour things. Because there's no basic respect for what is being devoured, there's no compassion in the relationship with it. When there is no compassion in your relationship with phenomena, whatever you devour turns into poison. Whatever you drink turns into something disgusting; traditionally you'd say it turned into liquid fire. This is the kind of analogy that's given of the hungry ghost, the yidag. The yidag is a being with a huge mouth and a very thin neck. It can get a hell of a lot into its mouth but it can't swallow anything. Whatever it sees looks good, so it eats it - but then it always turns out to be bad. It turns out to be really vile! It turns out to be bad because of how it's crammed into the mouth. It's a little bit like going to some amazing restaurant where the food is wonderful but you slather all over the table cloth and dribble on the waiter's arm. Then when the meal arrives you stuff it into your mouth so fast that you choke on it. You end up spitting it across the room and vomiting on the carpet because you want to stuff it all down at once. Bits of half-digested food get lodged in your nostrils, which makes you choke even more. You'd probably die if someone didn't beat you on the back. No matter how tasty it was, it would cause you pain because that's what happens when you turn into some kind of human vacuum cleaner. You can't possibly swallow food as quickly as you'd like to swallow it. There's so much in your mouth that you can't swallow, but you can't take it out either, because you're starving. So this is the quality of being a yidag. I nickname yidags 'intellectuals' because that's what intellectuals do - they gorge themselves on information and then regurgitate it all over each other.
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