What are the six realms?

The question "Do the realms actually exist?" is, to be a bit technical, a category question masquerading as an ontological question. Consider the question, “Are the six realms products of the human imagination?” Few would argue that they are not. Thus they exist, at least as products of the human imagination. The better way to phrase this question is: in what category do we put the 6 realms? Are they possibilities of actual experience? Are they descriptions of actual beings? Are they metaphors for subjective experience? Are they a nexus of energy in which we are caught, a bottomless pit from which there is no apparent way out, otherwise called samsara?

It is very hard to say definitely what is or is not for the simple reason that we cannot know what this experience we call life actually is. Chuang Tzu pointed this out a couple of thousand years ago. "Am I Chuang Tzu dreaming that I am a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that I am Chuang Tzu?" I love how the end of Box Trolls takes a look at this problem, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h7p0NckTKc

A friend and colleague of mine says that we don't have to believe that these realms exist, but we should practice with the idea that it is possible that they do. Is this a version of Pascal's gambit? Not really. It’s more about not believing that what we know through our senses, through our reasoning, or through our conditioning is the final word on everything.

For the purposes of the meditation  I describe in these postings, I am definitely interpreting the six realms as metaphors for the subjective experience of emotional reactions and the worlds they project. In the same vein, rebirth can be seen as a metaphor for how we move from one projected realm to another, many times every day, as different emotional reactions come and go. For most people in our culture, it is a big step to consider the six realms describe possibilities of existence. That resistance makes it more difficult for us to engage viscerally the experiences of the six realms. It all feels a bit like make-believe. On the other hand, if we take the realms as descriptions of the subjective experience of the emotional reactions, it is easier for us to move right into the experience of realm: feel the grasping quality of greed, how anger burns us from the inside out, how hate makes the slightest movement excruciatingly painful, etc. We don’t get hung up on wondering “Is it real?” We can move into the physical experience of emotional reaction. To change our relationship with these emotional reactions, to free ourselves from their tyranny, we have to be able to not only recognize but stand in and experience the visceral physical operation of the reaction itself.