Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The six realms are not abstract cosmology but a map of emotional patterns we cycle through in a single day — that is Ven Jampa Gendun’s central claim in this 23-minute talk. Starting from the premise that all experience arises from the conditioning patterns of mind and karma, he surveys each realm as a recognizable psychological style: the gods’ self-numbing absorption in pleasure; the demigods’ jealousy and paranoia (illustrated by a tree rooted in their territory whose fruit hangs in the god realm above); the human realm’s restless desire and perpetual comparison; the animal realm’s brutal goal-fixation; the hungry ghosts’ unquenchable craving; and the hell realm’s self-consuming, endlessly recycling hatred. He closes by briefly introducing the twelve links of dependent origination as the mechanism that keeps these patterns spinning. Accessible to newcomers to Buddhist psychology.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 16 H and M of B 1992 09 09.mp3
UUID: d39692ec-39c7-49cd-9d69-8039e4f676c0
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Buddhism (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1992-09-09
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 22.7 minutes
Words: ~2,505
The three realms are merely mind. And what he meant by that was that everything is a product of karma. We talked about karma. And karma is produced by the mind. Therefore, everything originates from the mind.
The karma are all these conditioning factors, all these variables, all these impressions, disposition, tendency, ways of organizing, our systems of beliefs. Everything which has conditioned our mind, due to which we conceive of, we organize, we interpret, thereby experience and relate and respond to and react to in accordance with these conditioning factors within our mind. This is common. These realms and levels can be thought of as expressions of emotional attitude. Some way we can, as it were, give physical embodiment to expressions of mind.
These are emotional expressions of our attitudes toward ourselves, toward our surroundings. Frozen projections, chronic patterns, a continual way of fixating a way of organizing we call it our house, we call the human realm. In the course of a single day, as humans, we may experience the emotions associated with all these levels of being, all these six levels. But usually we’re rooted in one. You know from the gods, from the from the from the self absorption of the gods down to the to the hatred and paranoia and pain and hell being.
But usually we’re primarily involved, caught up in one particular style as it were, one particular channel. And we talked about the channel, turning the channel compulsively to to a particular station, a particular program. This is out of a sense of fear, flight reaction to a sense of not being. We we continually Maybe it’ll become clear. So these are all our unique styles we have temporarily adopted in our struggle to solve the basic problem of ego.
These are the solutions that we’ve come up with. It’s like a teacher who gives you a problem and asks the students to solve the problem. These are the solutions, we have a problem and these are our various solutions. But the problem is the solutions become part of the problem. So we have to look for a better solution to the problem.
So beginning to talk about these various levels, it gives them feelings, some kind of a taste of what they might be like. You know what, we can think of them in terms of as I just said, expressions of emotional attitudes toward ourselves and our surrounding, the ecology and the feeling tone that we have with the relationship to this ecology. So the level of the gods, celestial beings. This is characterized by a search for extreme mental and physical pleasure. It’s an attempt to dwell upon all various types of seductive goals of all kinds like health, wealth, fame, beauty, virtue.
So the approach is always pleasure orientated in the sense of the maintenance of ego. It’s characterized by one begins to lose track of hopes and fears. And We forget what we are doing. We’ve come totally involved, absorbed. We have found an extremely pleasurable occupation and we become completely preoccupied, absorbed in it, addicted to it.
It consumes us. This is the idea of the absorption of the celestial being. The tendency is to regress to a warm state, to create some kind of cocoon for ourselves, some kind of something which we can insulate ourselves from all the petty annoyances of life. All the real world as it were. We would rather numb ourselves than to become more sensitive.
We We would rather turn ourselves off. We would rather sleep than awaken. So all of these tendencies to regress toward a warm state, to become numb, to unfeel, to become absorbed, to contract in. But eventually, as I mentioned, it’s not completely satisfactory no matter how self absorbed one may be in one’s pleasurable world that one has created for oneself. Eventually there’s some kind of disillusionment.
There’s some kind of disappointment. Our pleasurable world becomes a little bit shaky. The womb goes into a contraction. Cracks begin to appear in our cocoon. The anesthetic begins to wear off.
Something happens. Conscience demands to be heard, begins to break through our self deception, our distraction, our absorption. And we cannot quite go back to sleep. We simply cannot quite pull the covers over our head again. And if you felt like that, well I wish I could, you know we just can’t quite do that.
It’s kind of frustrating, isn’t it? You’d like to just go back to sleep, but you don’t, you’re too awake to do that. Our little self absorbed world becomes disturbed and it can no longer be sustained. And we find ourselves powerless to maintain it. So angrily we strike out or whatever or whoever has disturbed our nice, neat, insulated cocoon.
And we move into another way of relating with the world. We turn to another channel, another program. So this we turn to the demigod program. Channel nine. The dominant characteristic of the level of the demigods is jealousy and paranoia.
Jealousy and paranoia. We are in this realm, so we’re talking about the, you know, getting some feelings because it will begin to, we can get these feelings for these attitudinal realms that we all to some degree are rooted in. Then if we get the sense that these can find material expression, then maybe the possibility we can begin to open our mind up. So the realm of the demigods predominant characteristic is paranoia and jealousy. So we are preoccupied with comparison.
We are caught up in constant struggle to gain security and to achieve. Others and ourselves are simply standards of measurement. Fixed reference points so that we can decide whether we are getting where we want to go or not. There’s a tremendous drive to achieve, to prove oneself. Everyone including ourselves becomes an opponent.
This is the world of shoulds, ought, musts, the rule. There is ourselves who needs improving or who should be achieving. And so in this competition, everyone is a potential threat, including oneself. We need to be on guard, even with ourselves. We can’t relax.
We really we really cannot trust others with a situation or a self. So we ignore the actual situation. We refuse to learn from it. The universe ought to be other than the way it is. And it becomes our our lifelong preoccupation to make it, to force it to be that way.
There’s a basic dishonesty. Demanding that reality occur according to our demands. So there’s an atmosphere of hostility about everything, a lack of trust, competitive, acquisitive. If you notice, you can’t see it. There’s a tree here, which is very interesting because the roots of the tree are in the demigod realm.
But the tree grows up into the the god realm. That’s where all the fruits are. That just doesn’t seem fair, doesn’t it? That’s not the way the universe would be. The roots are in my territory.
I should be able to eat those fruits. So they’re always fighting. Know, they’re jealous of the gods who get to eat the fruit even though the roots are in their territory, their realm. The human realm. The human realm.
The major occupation at the level of the human realm or the human level is desire. That’s our main business. There’s an acute sense of separateness, that pleasurable objects are out there. This brings us a sense of poverty, we have a sense of loss. We feel only pleasurable objects are able to bring us comfort, that only pleasurable objects are able to bring us happiness, security.
So we do not feel adequate in ourselves. And we don’t feel adequate in allowing those objects to come to us naturally. We feel like we have to go out there and drag them back into our territory. They have to be appropriated. Everyone has their own style.
And we criticize those who do not meet our standards. And those who have our same style and are better at that style, who are better at achieving, we admire. And we want to be just like them. We are fascinated with what we lack. They are significant and we are not.
So we’re continually comparing ourselves, and this continual comparing and selecting brings a never ending process of desires and ambition. So in the human realm, intellect is the most active. There’s a constant churning out of ideals, of plans, of hallucinations, fantasies, and dreams. The mind is constantly searching for ways to improve the situation. In a way to manipulating, magnetizing.
Somehow, it is this constant restlessness of needing to move on, unending new beginnings, born out of perpetual dissatisfaction. Then there’s the animal realm. So it’s associated with stupidity. They’re preferring to blindly play the game, play according to the rules of the game. It’s a reactive mentality as opposed to a creative mentality.
It doesn’t matter who or what is destroyed in the process as long as the rules of the game are followed. That’s the important thing. The letter above the spirit.. This is the brutal bureaucrat. With this ignoring quality, there’s no concern with being truthful.
We find a way to justify ourselves, some kind of rationale to keep up our self respect, to maintain a front before others, even before ourselves. We do not see our environment, only our goals. And we invent all kinds of excuses to prove that what we are doing is right, that’s the right thing to do. Tremendous amount of self justification is necessary. So the essence of an animal style is to get what you want with extreme opacity, sincerity, seriousness, a very sincere pig.
Just kind of there’s no humor, there’s no openness. It just kind of like a tank rolling along from one thing to another. It doesn’t matter what it crushes, what it runs over in the meanwhile in order to get to its goal. Quality of stupidity, ignorant, ignoring, moving straight along. This quality of goal orientedness at the expense of maintenance.
Then there’s the level of the hungry ghosts. hungry ghosts are often, as they are here depicted, as having extremely small mouths, sometimes like the eye of a needle and huge stomachs, like sometimes as big as mountains, Gigantic stomachs. So there was a constant struggle to satisfy their hunger. This struggle is very painful. Our hunger may be for love, for friendship, for wealth, for status, for clothes, for sex, for virtue.
It can be for anything. And even when we find the object of our search, in the case of hungry ghosts, when they find food, it turns to molten iron. It burns them. So basically there’s mentality of poverty. You know people and the things about us become consumer items.
Even a beautiful sunset, you know we want to write a poem about it, we want to take a photograph of it, we simply cannot let it be. We have to do something with it. We have to as it were eat the sunset, consume the sunset. We have constant hunger for new entertainment, for new age spirituality, for sports, the arts, but they become boring after a while. And our hunger is not quite satisfied, so we have to move on.
There’s a constant need to keep moving on to something else, to something new. Something that which you’re looking for is just around the corner. It’s just up ahead, that kind of mentality. Some auspicious beginnings become ends in themselves. There’s a driven search for satisfaction.
So it’s painful to be suspended in unfulfilled craving and unfulfilled desire. And the next level is the level of the hell beings. This is pervaded by aggression. So it’s based upon the perpetual condition of hatred. We build up a complete environment of hate and we no longer are even quite sure of what we’re hating.
We lose track of what it is that we hate. We’re not quite sure where our hatred is to be directed. There’s simply hate. And there is just this recycling of hatred, like a crocodile that bites its own tail. And as it eats its tail, it’s nourished by its tail and its tail keeps growing.
So it’s just a continual recycling of hatred more and more, more and more. There’s no end to it. So the more you hate, the more that you see it is worthy of hatred. The more that you destroy, the more that you see needs to be destroyed. It becomes a fixed perspective, a way of viewing your reality.
Until the entire environment is seen as hostile. It all needs to be destroyed. It’s all aggressive. It’s all threatened. So the more we destroy, the more it needs to be destroyed including ourselves.
So we become consumed by our own aggression, by our own hatred. Everything is fire. We ourselves are fire. The level of hell is characterized by continuous mental and physical pain. So no matter who we are, each of us has adopted our own unique style in our individual struggle to solve this basic problem of ego.
Each of us is involved in the recreation of our particular world, our particular reality that we’ve developed for ourselves, our particular version. And we cling to it. We cling to our particular version as if our life depended upon it. And in a way it does. We are afraid of an open, creative, fluid way of relating.
And we cling to our chronic fixation, our particular versions of the world. And though our particular version of the world might not be satisfying, indeed though it might be painful, at least I can at least I know who I am and I can predict. I know what to expect. You know, as I’m fond of saying, it may not be much but at least it’s home. That’s the kind of attitude that we begin to take.
We just can’t quite imagine another way of being. We become very much stuck in this particular version of who I am and the type of world and how we’re going to relate with it. And then finally, there’s the outermost rim. And this is what is called the twelve links of dependent origination. Twelve links of dependent origination.
Just very briefly, because it’s quite an extensive explanation. This is the mechanism by which ego is, as it were, continually being reborn. The means by which we continually are recreating, reconfirming our particular reality. And in the fantasy world of ego, ego is fantasy, as it were. The twelve links of dependent origination is the process of compulsive rebirth under the controlling influence of these three basic afflictive emotions, the most basically, misknowledge, otherwise known.
I think it would be best if we can I think we’ll begin at the beginning? So if you like to we’re going to stop there. If you like to get a cup of tea, we’ll have a discussion.