Are there other realms of existence? Part II

What is the traditional Buddhist cosmology?

In brief, there are three realms: the heavenly realm, animal realm, and lower realms, each realm hosting its own unique characteristics, but all are impermanent.

The heavenly realm has an interesting cast of characters.  You’ve got your local nature spirits that live in the trees and have a pretty good life of celestial pleasures.  These guys live several hundred or even thousands of years.  You’ve got your Bezos-like celestial beings that live in something akin to a VR world where there’s no separation between reality and their desires.  If they want an ice-cream Sunday the size of New York and as intricately carved as a French cathedral, that’s what appears instantly for them to enjoy.  These guys are pushing the tens of thousands of years.  Then, you’ve got these brahma gods blissing out in states of near-infinite light and tranquility. These brahma gods also live in live exponentially longer than humans, with the highest ranking gods living for eons.

Traditional Buddhists see the heavenly realm as a nice place to chill out in, but, ultimately, futile because it all comes crashing down.  After blissing out with your every desire fulfilled at the speed of thought - beat that Amazon!, you eventually must pass on to another existence.  According to the older Suttas, most of these angels are destined for the lower realms immediately after where they’ll enjoy all kinds of torments.  If you’re a mighty brahma, chilling out in bliss for eons, you’ll come crashing back down to the world of beetles, sharks, and hungry ghosts where you’ll likely be trapped for an even longer time suffering with little respite.
The next realm is our realm, the animal realm.  It’s the world of ants, tigers, mosquitoes, and us.  Don’t need to go into much detail as I’m sure you’re already familiar with it.  Only thing I’ll add is two things.  First, traditionally the human realm’s seen as the best birth because…well, if I’m being honest, probably just self-serving anthropocentrism.

Anthropo-whatism?

Anthropocucumberism. It’s a very technical term. It describes centering your world view around cucumbers.  Shameful stuff, really.  The banana and pineapple community are quite upset by the growing tide of anthropocucumberism.  Protests, riots, assassinations, even, have been carried out to challenge it, yet it persists. Honestly, I’d thought we moved past cucumbers as a species, but apparently not.

I’m shocked.

Me too.  Sad times.  Sad times.

Do you have any tissues?

Sorry, I don’t believe in tissues.

How can you not believe in tissues?

Conspiracy theory from the anthropocucumberists.

But they’re on your table.  They’re literally right there.

Don’t know what you’re talking about, buddy.

Can we get back to the realms of existence?

Good idea.  Got a bit carried away there.  Yes, anthropocentrism.  Means human centered.  But the take that being a human’s the best is very convenient, since we usually think we’re the best at everything.  But from a traditional view, being human’s the best because there’s a mix of pleasure and pain.  The gods in the heaven realms are so enamored with their pleasures that they can’t be bothered to take up the study and practice of Dharma.  Other animals, like my cat, lack the faculties.  And if you’re in hell or a ghost, you’re just suffering and bereft of any chance of listening to and applying the dharma.  The only thing you can do in the lower realms is endure and hope for a better karmic roll of the dice next time around.

And the lower realms?

Those are very fun.  The Buddhist tradition’s divided on the particulars of what it’s like.  In Thailand, you’re being skewered in your orifices by burning-hot spears and having your limbs cut off.  In Japan, you might end up boiled alive in a vat of menstrual blood for tens-of-thousands of years.  In Tibet, you’re subjected to colds that break open your skin after which worms devour your exposed flesh until there’s only bone.  Then you spontaneously reappear for that to happen all over again.  The ghosts are also varied.  But, overall, everyone agrees that it really, really sucks.

With the traditional belief covered, I’ll give you my take: it's not true.  The two main reasons: 1) moving the goalposts and 2) lack-of-evidence.

1) Moving the Goalposts

This is the most egregious error that I’ve seen and it’s the biggest red flag: beliefs about rebirth constantly changing.  If I compare rebirth to a scientific principle, like evolution or gravity, these things have remain largely fixed since their discovery.  Sure, at more extreme ends of the philosophical or empirical spectrum, these things break down, but that’s true of every concept.  But given the bandwidth that they’re describing, they’ve held up over time in the face of increased scrutiny over the centuries.

The opposite is true of the realms of existence.  If you look at the most ancient sources, there are contradictions there.  There’s one story of a naga, a shape shifting serpent, who ordained as a monk.  When his friend went to visit him one afternoon, he saw his coils poking out of the windows of his hut and alerted the Buddha.  The Buddha threw the naga monk out of the sangha, declared that only humans can ordain, and required future preceptors to ask initiate monks whether or not they are a naga.  When I was ordained, I was still asked this.  If you answer no, you can’t be ordained.  So in the old days, the naga’s were magical creatures that lived with people in the same way that snakes or hyenas do.  As with most animals, you won’t see them frequently, but they’re around and directly influencing the world.

One of the most common chants in Theravada Buddhism, the Karaniyametta Sutta, originated with celestial beings driving monks out from their forest because they were irritated by their presence.  When the Buddha heard this, he taught them that loving-kindness chant to win over the deva’s hearts.  Even ordinary people witnessed ghosts, spoke with angels, and received visitations from the higher gods.
But in other parts, the Buddha says ordinary folks can’t see these things, including many of his senior disciples.  There’s one story where the Buddha smirks as he and a group of his monks are walking between villages.  A senior monk asks him why he’s smiling and he tells him that he sees a ghost flying in the air having its innards ripped out and consumed by a murder of crows.  After his body’s almost entirely consumed, it reappears and the whole act repeats.  It’s implied in the text that very few of his disciples can also see things like this.  

So what is it?  Is it easy to see this stuff, or not?  It’s not entirely clear from the texts themselves and I don’t think we’ll ever have an answer to what the original Buddha’s position was.  So there’s that.

But what followed for the last few millenia has been an embrace of the view that otherworldly creatures live among us.  Even when I was a monk in Thailand over 10 years ago, most of the older villagers thought of the various magical creatures of Buddhism, like the devas who live in trees, the shape shifting serpents, or even ghosts as living among people like squirrels do.  Perhaps more rare and a bit more selective as to who they graced their presence with.  But the younger generations don’t have largely abandoned this view.  With all the CCTVs and smartphones around, there’s no hard evidence of ghosts being caught moving furniture around, ripping out people’s hearts, or jumping out from the shadows to terrify folks.  Let alone nagas shape shifting into monks or devas harassing monks while they meditate. The overwhelming absence of evidence caused Buddhists to change their tune.

Now, instead of ghosts and devas living among us, they exist in some parallel realm of existence, accessible to those with strong enough minds.  These beings somehow parallel to our own space-time, yet are also beyond it?  While this theory does account for the lack of evidence, it creates some extremely difficult metaphysical questions.  How can something exist in another realm of existence and also exist at a particular house in San Francisco and afflict those particular people who enter it?  There has to be some interaction, otherwise how can it be connected to a place, but, at the same time, it can never be seen, it cannot throw plates or break windows.  If it does have influence, it’s in more vague ways.  A ghost can cause depression or nightmares.  It can make you sick.  It can invite someone to rob your house.  It can rot your roofing.  But get a beer from the fridge? No way.

The three realms of existence 3.0 here has god-of-the-gaps feels, especially given how sharp of a pivot Buddhists made in the 20th century.  There are also very, very hard metaphysical questions that this idea has to reckon with and the rebuttals often feel similar to theists who claim that this vague, complex incident, like cancer, getting a job, or a hurricane, was influenced by the gods, yet the gods can’t be bothered to actually lift up a pen and have it levitate inexplicably in the air for more than 30 seconds? C’mon.  This is very suspicious.  Very, very suspicious.  However, that’s not sufficient to reject it.  The lack of evidence is.

2) Lack of Evidence

There’s a lack of evidence in two areas: physical proof and research-backed theories of how the world works.  The lack of physical evidence is the strongest case.  In my home of Thailand, locals have claimed to have caught and preserved the body of a naga.  These sacred objects were billed as proof of the world beyond.  Many traveled hundreds of kilometers just to see these objects, fortify their faith, and receive blessings.  Only problem: they’re not nagas.  Turns out most of them were very rare, giant snakes that villagers caught and genuinely believed were nagas, never mind the fact that they’re not shape shifters.  Some of them were frauds.  And, to this day, no naga species has ever been found.

There’s a similar lack of evidence of the devas, especially by way of CCTV and smart phone.  Just think about how many millions of hours at this point naturalists have spent sitting in hides with their cameras running 24/7 for years just to get a rare shot of a Bird of Paradise mating dance or to catch a tiger stalking its prey.  Despite all of that footage, no devas have been caught sauntering about the forest or borrowing pens from people’s houses.  There’s also no evidence of otherworldly beings shaping the physical world.  That’s pretty strong proof that these guys don’t really exist.

Given this, they’d have to exist as some vague energy in some slightly alternative realm of existence?  Yet is impossible to detect by scientific instruments.  Seems extremely unlikely.

This is also supported by present scientific theory.  At this moment, we have the technology to detect black holes via minute gravity waves from millions upon millions of miles away, we can use satellites to receive radio signals and communicate around the globe, and have mapped out the different bands of light, but somehow we still can’t see the ghost that lives in grandma’s attic?  I’m not saying there’s absolutely no chance of other realms of existence, buuuuut it seems very unlikely.

Whether it’s objectively true, I’m 90% on, but I’m also confident that most people really experience these things.  I’ve experienced these things myself.  I’ve met devas, spoken with ghosts, been attacked by demons.  Seriously.  And I know many practitioners who’ve had similar experiences.  But it was a subjective experience.

But why do people persist in believing in it?

A few reasons, but I think the big one is that there appears to be a lot of evidence in support of it.  Case in point: my nephew died at a very young age and when my family gathered for a farewell ceremony to him in his room post-funeral, a disembodied spirit circled around the ceiling, blew open the doors, and disappeared into the night sky.  Ten people witnessed it.  Something happened, but what?

One explanation is, “Yes, it was a ghost.  Ghosts are real.”  But as pointed out above, this claim falls short because there’s just no physical proof to back it up.  While this incident happened long before smart phones were around, the last few decades with them, 24/7 cameras, and all manner of recording equipment, there’s been no objective proof to verify that ghosts are objectively real.  Which leads only one alternative: they’re subjectively real.  Our own perceptions shape how we see the world, true or not.  The Romans made critical decisions by consulting oracles, the flight of eagles, or even animal bones.  An eagle won’t tell you whether you should go to battle or not, but their belief in that did shape their decisions and, thus, the world.  My family, likewise, genuinely experienced that form flying about in the air, but that doesn’t mean there was an objective ghost flying around my nephew’s room.  Keeping these two sharply distinguished helps from falling into magical thinking.

Another reason people believe: they want to.  Ghosts, fairies, and gods bring a bit of wonder and excitement to what can seem like a lackluster, hum-drum world.  It also brings hope.  My life might suck right now, but if I pray hard enough, things will turn around for sure because the angels are on my side.  And the other thing is that these visions aren’t extraordinarily uncommon.  Dead relatives come for a visit in their dreams.  There’s an otherworldly sound they hear on their walk.  They see something luminous dancing in the trees at night.  So there’s this mileu of myth out there and a longing for the world to be more magical.  Doesn’t take a big leap to start to weave together a fantastic world.

Another reason: there’s some compelling evidence from Dr. Stevenson, a researcher who’s spent the last 50 years looking at claims of past life recollection, especially among young children, and then tried to verify if their claims were true.  He’s written a two-volume 22k+ page book which organizes his data and there’s some great stories in there, including a 9-year old Indian boy who could recall all of his family members and even the secret details of his sex life in his past life.  Stevenson goes through great pains to ensure that it’s not a case of people feeding information or vague corroboration.  He compares concrete facts to concrete facts.  If you’re interested in this topic, his books offer a great scientific approach.
This work does cast some questions on whether or not rebirth is possible or not, however, it does nothing for the question of other realms of existence.  All of these rebirth stories are of humans being reborn as humans.  There are no stories of someone being a ghost, angel, or cat and returning as a human.  So while they can be used to support the idea of reincarnation and push back somewhat on the physical scientific theory of the universe, it still doesn’t offer any evidence of heaven or hell realms, or even ghosts that haunt an abandoned house.

In the end, I land on this: there’s no heaven and no hell.  There aren’t gods in the sky pulling strings and making calls to make sure we’re ok.  There’s just this world and that, in-and-of-itself, is its own magic.