Hey!
One of the coolest concepts in Buddhist psychology is the 6 Realms.
Traditionally thought of as physical places you can end up in your next reincarnation, the 6 Realms can also be explained as different states of mind you can cycle through during your life or even one day:
The Hell Realm is feeling depressed and in angst and pain.
The Hungry Ghosts Realm is being caught in intense craving.
The Animal Realm is being solely concerned with your basic needs.
The Heaven Realm is satisfying your every desire and pleasure.
The Titans Realm is being envious of those in the Heaven Realm.
The Human Realm is dealing with the imperfections and dissatisfactions of human life.
Out of all of the realms we can find ourselves in, which do you think is the least opportune for growth—spiritually, personally, and professionally?
The Hell Realm? Maybe the Hungry Ghost Realm?
It’s the Heaven Realm.
You’d think that living in luxury and having an AI sex-robot assistant that’s also your personal guru would at least be a little bit advantageous for self-growth.
But turns out it’s entirely the opposite.
Being in the Heaven Realm is the most oppressive full-time job you could ever imagine.
When you’re there, your happiness is dependent on external things you can’t control: things—money, cars, and fancy objects—experiences—fine foods, vacations, events—and people—roles, approval, status, power.
If you want to stay in the Heaven Realm, then you have to have some way of ensuring they keep on flowing.
So your life in the Heaven Realm cannot help but be fully dedicated to the pursuit, maintenance, and protection of such precious “worldly pleasures”.
At least in the Hell Realm, when you’ve just been fired and your partner has left you and you just stubbed your toe again, you have the opportunity to work on yourself and wake up to your life.
When you have an endless supply of material pleasures, it leaves little time, energy, or motivation for any kind of real self-growth or introspective practice.
This is just one of the major drawbacks of living in The Heaven Realm, as described by super Soto Zen Priest Domyo Burk.
The second drawback of The Heaven Realm is that we want worldly pleasures to last forever, but they never do.
Brief moments of indulgence here and there aren’t necessarily a bad thing. It also isn’t a problem to want nice things: Good food to eat, a good education for your children, good health, a good roof over your head—all these are also worldly pleasures.
The problem is when we try to base our happiness and peace of mind on these things.
All worldly pleasures are “conditional”, meaning they’re dependent on the presence (or absence) of certain people, objects, conditions, or circumstances.
In other words, they’re impermanent—they constantly change and by their very nature they never, ever last.
Basing your happiness on things that never last is a recipe for constant anxiety and a slew of weird behaviors.
It’s the ongoing cycle of moving from meal to phone to desert to sex to phone to cigarette to whisky to bed to phone. You’re never present to enjoy what’s in front of you as you’re always anticipating where the next hit is coming from.
This brings us to the third drawback of The Heaven Realm: the ephemeral nature of worldly pleasures means we’re constantly seeking for more.
When your happiness is dependent on worldly things, much of life becomes a commute towards the “good times”. The in between moments are simply endured on the way to gaining more pleasure.
Worldly pleasures can help to hold you up and get you through the tough times. But when things get tougher, the worldly pleasures have to increase in quantity and intensity to match unless all can come crashing down in an instant.
Chasing more and more is just like trying furiously to fill a leaky bucket: it’s impossible no matter how hard you try or how many designer watches and cars you add to your collection.
Which brings us to the fourth drawback of the Heaven Realm. Because worldly pleasures are conditional, i.e. dependent on changing conditions, we can become obsessed with preserving or enhancing our conditions.
Call it The American Dream or The Pursuit of Happiness or whatever. It’s building up your glass fortress and surrounding yourself with people that only agree with you and hoarding money like a crazy squirrel.
This also ties into the fifth drawback of worldly pleasures: the misery of being surrounded by pleasures and yet, being separated from them and unable to truly enjoy them.
All of these drawbacks are tainted with misery. But the type of misery of chasing pleasure and satisfaction and not being able to get it is another level of misery.
Trying to find happiness in conditions is characterized by an avoidance mindset. Like a mouse being chased by a cat, the motivation and drive come from trying to get away from something: in this case, it may be a sense of emptiness and meaninglessness that pervades your being.
This is opposed to an approach mindset: being motivated and driven by moving towards and achieving positive outcomes for yourself and others.
When pain and anxiety are your main motivating factors, then worldly pleasures aren’t pleasurable or satisfying: they’re moments of relief from a terrifying hungry feline that wants to eat you up.
On top of this, the more you run, the scarier it gets. So, the only thing you can do is overindulge, become busier and busier, grab more for yourself, and try and ignore Reality breathing down your neck.
The fact that chasing happiness in conditions is full of drawbacks and leads to a tonne of stress is the rationale behind the whole of the Buddhist path.
There is another way.
Instead of grasping at and trying to hold onto impermanent pleasures and things in the world, it’s possible to find a much deeper and lasting source of satisfaction within ourselves.
This is peace and happiness that’s not dependent on conditions, and the topic of the second part of this email coming next week!
Hugs,
Joe