Episode 20: Of Hell Realms and Gods

One Heart One Mind

Thomas McConkie

Meditation, Spirituality, Mindfulness, Contemplation, Psychology, Buddhism, Development, Thomasmcconkie, Religion & Spirituality

5 • 632 Ratings

🗓️ 29 November 2023

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In an immature contemplative practice, we tend to assume that the whole point is to learn to draw as much pleasure from each meditation session as we possibly can. As we become more experienced, however, we learn that it is natural to traverse many “realms” throughout the day and throughout our lives. The question becomes, can we remain as fully awake in the realm of the gods as we can in the depths of hell.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to another episode of Mindfulness Plus.
0:07.0	I'm your host Thomas Mekonki. Thanks for listening today.
0:11.0	I want to talk about the six realms of rebirth and existence that are taught in the Buddhist tradition.
0:20.0	Briefly I'll name them and I want to tell a story about my visit that are taught in the Buddhist tradition.
0:27.1	Briefly, I'll name them, and I want to tell a story about my visit in one of the realms,
0:28.4	particularly recently.
0:31.4	Next, I'll talk about how we're going to practice with them.
0:35.9	The realms, you may have heard of them, even if you don't know a lot about Buddhism,
0:42.1	Buddhism has penetrated popular culture to the point that we throw things around now without even necessarily knowing where they come from.
0:45.8	The six realms of rebirth, existence in Buddhism are the god realm, the demiggod realm, the realm of the human being, the animal realm, the realm of the hungry ghosts, and the hell realm.
1:08.7	Personally, I think if I picked one realm that is thrown around most in popular culture,
1:14.3	it's the hungry ghost. I hear a lot of talk about the hungry ghost realm in circles outside
1:21.7	of Buddhism as well. I'm not going to go into detail on what the realms are exactly.
1:31.7	They're intuitive in the sense that, you know, the God realm is full of bliss.
1:39.2	And the demigod realm less bliss, the human realm, even less.
1:45.0	And then when we get into the animal realm, the realm of the hungry ghosts and the hell realms, it's an increasing amount of suffering.
1:47.0	So these realms, they kind of depict the full range of experience that we human beings are susceptible to, you could say.
1:57.0	Some Buddhist schools take these realms to be ontologically, metaphysically literal.
2:03.6	The Mahayana school particularly treats these as mind states. They're, you know, in a 24-hour cycle, we can move through these six realms many times over.
2:13.6	I was on vacation recently in Vermont. Some friends of ours were in town. We took a road
2:22.1	trip a couple hours up the road to just hang out with some friends for a few days. It was the first
2:27.8	vacation we've been on since our daughter was born. So it's our first two-kid family road trip. Just a couple hours up the road from
	...

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