How Heaven Becomes Hell
a description of how easily we slip from one state to another without noticing

The Six Realms
Part one

We are sacred space: pure intelligence, pure awareness, crystal clear. Emptiness. Shunyata. However, it’s recognising what we do within this sacred space that matters. We fill it up with conceptual fixations, making it more and more solid or frozen.

To see this in action, we must observe our emotions, and especially the particular emotion to which we are holding on, and which is driving us. This may be seen in our behaviour – both short term and long term – which becomes our personality for this lifetime. If we do not recognise our sacred space, then we live within an emotional realm with certain identifiable characteristics.

We could say that there are as many realms as there are sentient beings, but that’s too much to comprehend. In Tibetan Buddhism, it is said that there are 84,000 types of beings and so 84.000 types of disturbing emotions – and even that is too large to understand, so it has been narrowed down to six, which correspond to the six basic negative emotions. To be more precise, there are three fundamental disturbing emotions – desire, aversion and ignorance – and the basis of that is ignorance of our true nature, pure awareness.

Identifying these realms – these emotions – is good news as the emotions actually relate to the wisdoms and specific Buddha families (wisdom families). The Buddha family to which we relate is the wisdom through which we express ourselves*. The moment we recognise is the moment of freedom – this is the Buddha in the Mud! The healing is in the recognition: it’s that simple. But first we have to identify the problem before it can be healed.

The six realms are the god realm, the jealous god realm, the human realm, the animal realm, the hungry ghost realm and the hell realm. These are psychological states, and create the type of world in which we live – or choose to live. From this point of view, the realms are varying densities of emotions, filling sacred space. We could understand this basic space as our essential nature, or we can dig in our heels and never find complete fruition.

I don’t want to make this too long, and there are fuller explanations available elsewhere. What is important is to have an overall view and see the realms in action, especially when dealing with others – the smug, the argumentative, the addict, the mechanical person lacking humour, the greedy, the blamer. We are all of these – or rather, our mindset is.

* this will be expanded upon in another essay