Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute talk, Ven Sanghy Khandro unpacks the six realms of saṃsāra as states of mind we experience now—not distant afterlife destinations. She uses vivid examples—a samurai’s rage, a psychiatric patient hallucinating iron birds, the addict enslaved by craving—to show how hell-states (fear, paranoia), hungry-ghost-states (endless hunger), animal-states (narrow self-focus), and god-states (ephemeral happiness masking ignorance) arise from specific mental causes. The human realm holds the advantage: enough suffering to motivate freedom, enough clarity to see a way forward. She addresses whether beings reborn as animals retain past-life impressions, examines the reliability of recalling past lives and clairvoyance, and argues that inspection of one’s own mind is the only genuine test. She closes with meditation instruction: breath-focus as the rope that tames the wild mind.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 Basic.mp3
UUID: 033f4373-32c4-44c4-b887-81ebdb9a1858
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Basic Buddhism (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Date: 1985 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.8 minutes
Words: ~3,055
In the next life, we’ll go downwards. We’ll regress into lower forms of existence, into more suffering, greater suffering, greater ignorance. Whereas if we live our lives with care, that’s what keeps it going. That’s kind of the energy. This whole thing doesn’t show everything.
It only shows saṃsāra which is a negative thing, which is a kind of existence in which we suffer, in which we are ignorant of reality. He looks like he’s pointing to the bridge. But anyway, the idea is he’s pointing the way out. He’s an enlightened person who shows the way out of the whole realm. So once a person can… There are different levels of negativity as well.
I think probably all religions talk about the need to be kind and loving and to not be angry and hateful and desirous, and that’s pretty universal. But the idea of ignorance and overcoming ignorance doesn’t seem to appear in other religions. I think that’s going to a deeper level of things because within saṃsāra there’s states of being which are really beautiful, which are really full of goodness and beauty and joy and love and all that. But the beings still have ignorance, still tend to see things as having a permanent, real, solid existence. Ignorance in itself is negative only because it keeps us stuck in this situation.
It doesn’t allow us to become free of it. But it isn’t negative in the same way that hatred is, in that, you know, it’s really destructive and it causes all kinds of problems. But it’s a very, very subtle kind of problem. And as far as I can see, not that I’ve done any great deal of study of other traditions, but it seems that Buddhism is the only one which goes to that very, very subtle level of ignorance. There’s even other religions that talk about heaven.
You know, the possibility of reaching heaven when you’re good, when you’re kind, and so on. You can reach a heaven, but there’s still ignorance. You know, even that heaven is still… This is finite, it doesn’t last forever. It lasts for a long time, but eventually the karma or the predispositions to experience that realm run out, and then they die. And when they die, they usually go back to one of the other realms and going down, even being bumped down in the same realm, is pretty awful for them because their experience there is so wonderful.
We look at just sort of the main characteristics of the realms, because they’re all just states of mind. They’re not necessarily physical places, but they’re states of mind that we create for ourselves. For example, hell. Hell is a state of mind of great fear, paranoia, and aggression. And there are times when we feel that way, when we feel like everybody’s against us and nothing looks good, everything looks bad, nothing pleases us.
We just feel really miserable. You know, your friend comes over with a beautiful chocolate cake. We’re miserable. We don’t enjoy it. You know?
I mean, there’s times when we’re like that, when we’re just really stuck into some kind of negative, miserable thing or fear. Whenever we’re stuck into fear somehow, that’s a hellish state of mind or aggression when you’re really angry and hateful towards somebody or something. It’s like hell. And there was an interesting story the other day. It’s a Zen master, a Japanese Zen teacher.
And a samurai came and said, he wanted to know about heaven and hell. He said, is it true? What is… is there such a thing as heaven and hell? What’s it all about? And the teacher started abusing this warrior and he was saying, you know, I’m not going to tell you because you’re too dull. You wouldn’t be able to understand. He kept saying things like that and this warrior was getting more and more and more furious, you know, because his ego was being attacked. Finally, he got to the point where he raised up his sword and was ready to chop the teacher’s head open.
And the teacher said, “That is hell.” He got him into an experience of hell. And then he said that and then the warrior understood the teaching.
We can also say that people who are insane, you know… there was a Buddhist monk who used to be a doctor, working with psychiatric patients, and he said he had a patient come in one day who kept having these visions of a huge black metal bird, with a great big metal beak, attacking him, chasing him, and coming at him, you know, with its beak. And for this guy, it was real. You know, he really saw it. Nobody else could see it, of course, but this guy would see it. In fact, the doctor said while he was sitting there in his chair, the guy facing him, there was a window behind him, and the guy was talking about this bird, and he looked at the window and he said, “There it is! There it is!” And his whole being was just overcome with fear and he finally committed suicide. And this friend of mine, Doctor McDonald, said when he was reading Buddhist texts, he actually read that description of these iron birds chasing you with their iron beaks and stabbing you with their beaks. And he said he was really amazed that this guy was actually experiencing it and that was a kind of hell.
There’s different kinds of hell. There’s different kinds of experiences that people can have. Some are very fiery, some are icy. And we ourselves have similar experiences when we’re very, very dissatisfied. And I think we all have these times when you just can’t find what you want.
You know, you’re really restless, really restless and you want something and you try this and you try that and you just cannot find what you want. And so there’s this kind of constant gnawing hunger for something that you cannot get, cannot find. So these experiences are the result of other things, like the hell realm is mainly a result of extreme cruelty and inflicting pain on others, causing pain to others. The result is extreme pain. You experience pain or paranoia, you know?
You can really see the link there between having hurt others and being paranoid, waiting for it to come back. You know it’s going to come back. You know it. You’re just waiting for it. And the hungry spirit realm is the result of miserliness, denying things to others, being very miserly, not giving when somebody asks you for something or needs something, and you’re so afraid that if you give you’re going to be without it.
So your very miserliness itself leads to or it is, actually, miserliness is this kind of experience of feeling like you never have enough or you never have what you want, you never have what you need. You’re so concerned about having. There’s no satisfaction, there’s no peace there. And in the animal realm, it’s a state of mind of very narrow, very limited seeing. Most animals can only see so much in front of them to either side.
Animals don’t have the ability to look, to think far ahead into the future or to think of others. There’s a few exceptions. Animals that might do something to help another being, another creature, but most animals are very much self-centered. You know, they only see themselves there. They only take care of themselves.
That situation mainly, it’s a state of mind. We’re in that state of mind, too, sometimes. We’re very stuck in seeing our own little world, our own little life, our own needs, our own family, our own just what we need, and we just close off the rest of the world. So, biologically they’re limited like that, but where does the animal realm come from? I mean, how does one become an animal?
Why is one being a dog and another human? I mean, we don’t really tend to think like that because… but see, according to the Buddhist view, a person, a being, a mind, can go into any of these realms. You know? We can become animals. We can become… Yeah.
That’s what the Buddhists say, that after we die… Yeah, we’re not humans forever, inherently. We have a potential after we die to reincarnate as an animal. If we fail to take advantage of the opportunities we have as human beings, if we’ve just wasted our lives and we’ve done useless things and harmful things, we could regress and find ourselves as an animal. How do you get out of that? Well, there isn’t much you can do as an animal, but we carry with us the impressions of everything we’ve ever done.
So even if you find yourself stuck as an animal for a while, we still have some positive impressions or positive predispositions from when we were human or when we were in other realms. And so when we finish our life as an animal, those impressions can carry us out. Well, in the process of working on one’s own mind, you can get to a place, you can get to a state where you kind of open up your mind to your past experiences and you can look back and see what you’ve been, what you’ve done, and come to know your past lives. And also you can develop clairvoyance and be able to look into others and see their experiences and their past lives. So that’s the source.
Those who’ve been able to do that have seen that they’ve gone from human to animal to hell to god and so on, and see that others are doing the same. That’s supposedly… I mean, I’m just repeating what I’ve learned, what I’ve heard. Well, like I said, it’s really up to us to check it out for ourselves. I mean, we can’t really make any final decision, you know, with this side or that side or whatever. But the only thing we can really know for sure is through our own experience.
But that means, you know, working on our minds and developing our own ability to see these things, to understand these things. I know there’s a lot of problems on that point. What I tend to just do is look in my own mind and try to be honest with myself about my own experiences and my own potentials. I just find with myself, if I’m really honest, I feel that I do have the potential to be an animal or to regress. It is hard.
Of course, you don’t want to think about being, you know, a dog or a cat. But if you think of it that way, if you again, if you think of them in terms of mental states, states of mind rather than physical forms, and look into your mind and see, you know, do I have that within me? Do I have that sort of potential or that possibility within me? Or am I just going to keep getting better all the time?
It’s more like, is it possible to regress? Or does spiritual evolution, progression, just continue happening automatically, on all the time? Or stagnation, I suppose, just staying on one level. It’s one way of maybe thinking about it. We’re brought up with Darwin’s idea of evolution and that, you know, which starts off really primitive and then eventually there’s human beings and human beings get better. We like to think in that way, that we’re all working towards enlightenment, which is true in a way.
Everyone will eventually become enlightened. But the Buddhist idea isn’t just linear. It’s circular. And concepts of time and space. An enlightened being is aware of past, present and future in one moment.
You know, there isn’t past, present and future. Everything is right now. You can’t really see for that. But that just shows how we are limiting our way of… we tend to think when we feel happy, you know, when we feel happy. We tend to feel, “Oh, that’s it.
Everything’s fine now.” And we don’t think, “Oh, this isn’t going to last, is it?” We don’t like to think that. But it’s true. It doesn’t last.
Whatever happiness occurs in that state always comes to an end and then it falls down again into some kind of state of depression or unhappiness or dissatisfaction or whatever. So that’s the problem with this realm, with the god realm. And the beings who are there tend to feel like they’ve made it, that they don’t have anything to worry about, they don’t have anything to do, just enjoy themselves, and so they use up all their good potentials. They kind of exhaust whatever good energy has got them to that state, it’s exhausted. It’s used up, comes to an end, and there’s nothing left, and then they go down again.
They fall down into one of these realms. Now, they say the human realm is the best realm. The human state of mind is the best state of mind in that we get a taste of suffering and we get a taste of pleasure. We’re sort of in between both. And we don’t have so much suffering, most of us anyway, most beings don’t have so much suffering that we’re just totally… we can’t see clear of it, you know?
We can’t… like, when you’re in pain, you know, you can’t think of meditating. You can’t think of enlightenment or spiritual work. You know, you’re just totally enveloped in pain. So most human beings, I think, are not in that situation. We have enough pain to know that we want to get out of it, we want to be free of pain. But we have enough space and clarity and intelligence to be able to see that there is a possibility, that there is something to do, that we need to do it.
I mean, the human realm does offer the ideal situation, but it doesn’t mean every human being has the ideal situation. Or even if they do, they mature spiritually. Well, yeah. In one life? Well, like I said, I think somebody who’s addicted to alcohol or drugs and his whole life sort of revolves around that obsession, that addiction is like… maybe we would… I mean, I think the Buddhists wouldn’t say that that is a hungry spirit, but it’s very much like that. Their existence is like that in the same way that this person who saw the iron birds attacking him, he wasn’t exactly in hell. Not strictly speaking, because he had a human body. He was in the human realm, but his mind, his experience was in hell. So I guess, I mean, I suppose there’s a lot of overlap between the different realms.
So somebody could be in a human realm, you know, physically, but mentally in another realm. Physically in one of the other realms and mentally in a different realm. I mean, there could be some animals who are physically animals, but mentally much more advanced, you know, much closer to the human realm, maybe. You know, who can say? But if you think of these as states of mind, you can see how we, at times in our life, we experience all of these different realms, all of these states of mind.
And the main thing, the main point, isn’t to worry about do these realms exist or not? Is it possible to be born in this realm or that realm after being human? That’s not so important. The important thing is to recognize these experiences in our own mind and to try to get beyond them and to try to work out those experiences and the causes of them. You know, what causes those experiences?
Because it’s all… the whole thing is just created by the mind, created by a mind which is stuck in ignorance and hatred and desire. I didn’t really get to the other two truths, but basically it’s how to get out of this situation. Maybe I’ll talk about that tomorrow. I thought maybe it would be nice to just finish with a meditation.
We haven’t done too much meditation today. I’d love to do more, but maybe it’s nice to just meditate for a while and try to settle down all this information. The analogy is sometimes made: developing one’s ability in meditation, or one can say training the mind or taming the mind, is like taming a wild horse. In the beginning, the mind is really wild. There’s no control at all.
Anything goes in the mind. If you’re taming a horse, the first thing you have to do is to get a rope around its neck so that you can at least start to get it confined to a certain area, and then you’ve got some degree of control over it, then you can slowly work with it from there. So this practice of focusing on the breathing is like getting the rope tied around the mind. It’s confining it, tying it down to a certain extent, tying the mind down to one object so that then it’s not just completely wild, running all over the place, doing whatever it wants to do, but we’ve got it tied down. Then we can watch the mind, we can learn to discriminate what’s happening in the mind, picking out the different types of experiences that are coming up in the mind.
Then the next step would be to work with whatever is there, to work with the raw material, the experiences that we have in the mind, with the idea of improving, developing, nourishing whatever is positive in the mind and working with whatever is negative.