The Different Realms of Existence and Karma

Understanding Rebirth in Life Forms Other Than Human or Animal

A topic that is often skipped over is that of the sufferings of the three lower realms, or the “three worse realms” as I prefer to call them. The Tibetan term is actually the “three bad realms,” but “bad” seems a bit heavy, so I call them worse. There’s no word that refers to these realms as “lower.”

Some people like to make a Dharma-Lite version of the worst realms, and in fact of the various six realms. We can accept that there are humans and animals, and some people might accept that there are ghosts or spirits. Other life forms, however, are a bit difficult. The Dharma-Lite version says that the realms are really talking about psychological or mental states of humans. One aspect of the teachings points out that after rebirth in one of these realms there’ll remain a slight residue of that type of experience in a human rebirth, if it is a human rebirth that follows. So in fact there is something similar in a human experience, but this is not Real Thing six realms.

In Real Thing Dharma, everything is based on a mental continuum with no beginning or end. If we examine what is experienced in terms of sights, sounds, physical sensations, happiness and unhappiness and so on, we can see that there are many different parameters that affect and color our experience, interest, disinterest, attention and lack of it. For each of these parameters we’re talking about a whole spectrum that ranges from total interest to total disinterest, total attention to no attention at all, total anger to no anger whatsoever, and so on. We always experience everything on a spectrum like this.

This is the case with sight, for example, where there’s a whole spectrum of light and with our human hardware, we’re only able to perceive a certain amount of that spectrum. We can’t see infrared or ultraviolet light, but have to use mechanical hardware to perceive them. But the hardware of an owl, for instance, is able to perceive sights that we can’t, like in the dark.

With the hardware of a dog’s ears, a dog can hear sounds of higher frequency than the human ear can. A dog’s nose is far more sensitive to smells than our human noses. These points are quite clear. Just because the hardware of the human body can’t perceive a certain portion of a spectrum of sense information, it doesn’t mean it’s impossible for those portions beyond our borders to be perceived by others. Just because we can’t see ultraviolet and infrared, it doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. It just requires different hardware.

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