Karma and the Six Realms of Samsara

STUDENT 1
I'm wondering how to relate to the game—the game of existence—as a player, when it feels like I'm not winning the game. When it feels like my karmas seem to be so intractable that I'm having a hard time feeling like I'm getting anywhere.

SHAMBHAVI
Well, as my puja teacher said, when you feel like you're failing, lower your expectations. [laughs]

I can tell you right now that as a result of whatever you're doing—including practicing, but I'm sure other things, too—you are very much different than you were when I first met you.

We all relax at our own pace, right? We all realize at our own pace. You have some expectations of something. I don't know what it is. And of course, you're still suffering. We all have our sufferings, right? And you want that to go away.

But things are happening, and they've been happening ever since I've met you. They just apparently aren't happening fast enough for you. But that's often the fate of humans.

This is part of practice, is to resign ourselves to what's actually happening. And resign ourselves to when we don't do as well as we wish we had.

That doesn't mean be fatalistic and give up. When I say resign ourselves, it means take that as what needs to be happening from the divine mother. In my case, that's how I think of it.

You can think of it as anything you want, the divine tortoise, whatever. [laughs] I don't care. But think of it as what it is.

You're just doing the thing you were put here to do. And it can't be speeded up and it can't be slowed down.

So take what's happening as wisdom. And even your own frustration. That's what you need to surrender or yield to, or dissolve, or work with, is the frustration that you feel.

And it's also being humble. Our expectations of ourselves in this culture are just ridiculous.

Somebody came into satsang live at the retreat last week and said, oh, you look very red. And I said, that's just because online, you look like you're drained of all blood.

You just get completely washed out online because of all these filters that are being applied on our faces. I can't get rid of them. I turned them all off, and there's still filtering happening. Because we're all supposed to look a certain way, right?

And then in person, we're like, what's wrong? You have details! Oh, no! [laughter]

STUDENT 2
If you could say a little more about humility.

SHAMBHAVI
We were all made in a certain condition. I've told this story before, but you might have forgotten or hadn't heard it.

Once I had a dream, and in the dream, I was in a crowd of people. We were all pranaming like this with our heads bowed. And there was some great spiritual personage coming in, and we were waiting for her.

It turned out she was some dakhini. And she was coming along and greeting people. And she came to me, and she took my head in her hands and put her forehead up to mine. And then she said, oh, you finally made it back. [laughs]

She was happy. But what I got in that instant was I'd taken lifetimes of a detour. That's what was transmitted to me.

I had been in some high position as a teacher. I had totally fucked up because of pride, and I'd gone on some giant pride-scraping lifetimes detour. [laughs]

And I'd finally made it back to where the wisdom beings were going to give me another chance. [laughs]

So, because of that dream and actually other dreams, too, that kind of corroborated that, I've often thought of this lifetime as a lifetime when it's my lifetime to really work on humility. And actual modesty. And not go on that lifetimes detour again.

So, you're just noticing this this lifetime, right? That's good! You're not going to have to go through a whole nother lifetime of not noticing that you're missing out on some humility. So feel good about that!

STUDENT 3
And what about looking back at all the fuck-ups?

SHAMBHAVI
You have no idea how much you've fucked up. [laughter]

STUDENT 3
Do you mean, in previous lives?

SHAMBHAVI
Yes. [laughs] Yeah! I mean, we've all done well and we've all fucked up 100 billion times.

STUDENT 3
It's oddly reassuring.

SHAMBHAVI
It's oddly reassuring, yeah.

You know, it's actually pride to be bemoaning the fact that you didn't notice this earlier. Instead of feeling grateful, like, oh my God, thank God I noticed this at all now.

Whatever we notice, we can work on. What we don't notice, we can't work on. So in a lifetime, when we notice something, don't put it off. Because who knows when we'll notice it again? We'll forget.

You've asked me this question a lot, so I wonder if in between you forget.

Sorrow and regret are different in the sense that this chronic sorrow about how things went wrong is very self-focused. It is not helping anyone, including you. It's just keeping you in a loop.

Can you just regret this and get your courage up, get your fire up, and move on to make it better? Because you do have some say in what happens next. You have no say in what happened already.

The sorrow that you feel is part of realm vision. It's part of your karmic load. And it's just keeping you in that loop. It's not actually producing anything but itself.

And at some point, when we regret how we've been, the only healthy answer is to be different tomorrow. To start working incrementally on being different from now on. That's what you have control over.

Some control. [laughter] Not maybe tons, but some.

So recognize that the sorrow you're feeling is part of your karma. Because you keep repeating it over and over.

It's keeping you in a loop, in a kind of prison. It's not helping you work on your humility. It's just perpetuating itself like a little virus that wants to keep going.

Sorrow is an emotion, right? It's an emotion. We all feel sorrow. But if that sorrow is not bound karmically, then we'll feel it, and eventually it'll just go away.

If not immediately, then– Some sorrow will stick around like if we're grieving someone who died. But eventually, all sorrows that are not tied up in a karma will eventually go away.

But you just keep repeating this. So this is sorrow bound up in karma. And it has a kind of life cycle, and it wants to survive, and it has you convinced that it's somewhat important.

STUDENT 3
[laughs] Yeah.

SHAMBHAVI
Yeah, it's not. [laughs]

So there's nothing wrong with sorrow at all. That's just a normal emotion. But this caught-in-a-loop of sorrow, yeah.

So maybe you need to do a little ritual where you just lay that sorrow to rest and determine, make a determination, an inner determination, to do better. As best you can.

That's the only thing that God can expect of you is to do the best you can. No one can expect any more.

STUDENT 4
I take herbs to help with my pitta. Are we actually kind of reducing our karma? If we're out of balance in our dosha, is that increasing our karma, or how does that relate?

SHAMBHAVI
Yeah, absolutely. So pitta relates to emotions like frustration, resentment, anger, sarcasm, being critical, those kinds of things. So if your pitta is too high, you're going to have more of those kind of emotions.

And that means you're going to get involved with people in certain ways that are recognizable patterns. And that's going to perpetuate karmas.

So karma's a pattern of a certain thing moving through time. It could be an emotion. It could be– our human bodies are karmas, that we're fashioned this way. There's many, many kinds of karmas.

But for an individual, the doshas are related to the five elements, which are related to certain health and emotional patterns, right? And ways that we think, and all that kind of stuff.

So if we're out of balance, we're going to repeat characteristic, familiar ways of entanglement. And that's just going to perpetuate and build more momentum in that direction, right?

If we're more IN balance, we're not going to be putting as much energy into those habitual patterns, which means that we're going to have a wider range of expressivity than we did.

It's, like, we can drive on the part of the road that doesn't have a tire rut in it. [laughs] So that's how it works.

And of course, dosha means fault. We have a constitution when we come in. Dosha is sort of the characteristic way that we go out of balance.

So someone with a pitta dosha predominant in their constitution, when they're out of balance, they're going to have a tendency to go out of balance in that particular way.

And so what we want to try to avoid is doing that so much that we increase those karmic grooves.

And we were talking the other day about how karmas represent a certain quantity of unconsciousness and also habit pattern that is a little compulsive. Or a lot compulsive sometimes. So we don't want to go those ways more than is necessary.

STUDENT 5
So I have a question about the God realm. From my understanding, it's pleasurable on some level to be in the God realm, to have some God realm vision?

SHAMBHAVI
Totally.

STUDENT 5
And I feel, like, maybe I'm, like, weaponizing this teaching to judge people for having that experience.

SHAMBHAVI
So first of all, if we're criticizing people for being how people are, in that way that you just described, there's something that we're envious of.

And I would say that what you might be envious of isn't the pleasure of that realm. It's that people in the God realm think they're better than other people.

They think they have achieved more spiritually, and they are above and beyond others. That's part of their armoring, and part of their shtick, right?

So someone in the titan realm isn't going to like that. [laughter] Who told YOU you're better? [laughs] I'M better, or I want to be better. You know?

The thing also about God realm is, more than any other realm, it needs an audience. More than any other realm, it needs to pull other people in.

And second in line for needing an audience is titan realm.

So not only God realm, are you saying you're higher, but you're also stealing my audience!

OTHER STUDENT
Why is that SECOND in line? [laughter]

STUDENT 5
Um, this is resonating with me, clearly. [laughter]

SHAMBHAVI
I thought it might. Yeah.

So the motivations for God versus titan are different because God realm, people that like to hang out there, they're afraid of death and illness and aging. They're afraid of anything that hints at our mortality.

And so they have all these fantasies about how they're going to escape those things by having the right spiritual opinions, and wearing spiritual clothing, and getting spiritual tattoos, and posing as spiritual teachers.

They want witnesses to that. They want confirmation that they have ascended in some way and that they're not going to be subject to disease and death and old age like the rest of us.

At the start of the pandemic, much to my surprise, some Buddhist spiritual teachers that I formerly really respected were getting on Facebook and saying things like, if you do mantras, you're not going to get COVID.

I was like, okay! I had no idea these people were so in the God realm. That's, like, such a fantasy.

First of all, even though there probably are a handful of people on Earth that could do mantra and not get COVID, the rest of us schlubs [laughter] are not really all that good with mantra [laughs], right?

It wasn't even recognizing that we're all in different conditions.

Some people hate mantra. Some people have no relationship to mantra. Some people do it, but it's just kind of a chore. Other people do it, and they get something out of it, but it's certainly not never having a disease.

Anyway, so the motivation for God realm is to push away the knowledge of our physical frailty and mortality.

And then the motivation for titan realm, though, is to push away shame.

To push away a feeling that we don't know what our worth is. And that we might be not worthwhile. Or we've devalued ourselves. Or we've been devalued. And that has brought up shame.

So the motivation for titan realm and God realm are really, really different. But they both want other people to corroborate their realm vision.

All the realm visions want that, but titan and God really want it a lot more than others. And they are both trying to become best at something.

Titan realm more in external accomplishments. So someone in the titan realm will be really hard core practitioner, pushing themselves to a physical limit, wanting to be recognized for how hard they're working.

Titan realm will define success as struggle and hard work, kind of thing. Whereas someone in the God realm will be like, [scoffs] you're doing all those mantras? [Scoffs] I did those once. [laughter]

It's really irksome to titan realmers to be around God realmers. Because they're competing for the same space but really differently.

And God realmers, you cannot get around them. They have an answer for everything. It's this very looped kind of a thing. No matter what you say, they're going to scurry to some higher plane. [laughs] And that's also really annoying.

Meanwhile, the poor titan's just struggling and making all that hard effort. While all those God realmers are just sitting around pontificating. It's really annoying. [laughs]

STUDENT 6
I was going to say I can really relate to the titan realm. The shame part and trying to get out of that. But the part about the hard work, I feel like I'm too lazy for that or something? [laughter]

I'm wondering if you have any insight on that.

SHAMBHAVI
Yes. Unfortunately for you, I do.

STUDENT 6
Shit. [laughter]

SHAMBHAVI
So there is an aspect of titan realm, which I've called the secret titan. And that is someone who's...maybe it's laziness. You do have a lot of kapha in your constitution. Laziness might play a role. It certainly does for me in my constitution.

But it's also being afraid to compete because you're afraid that you'll be found to be lacking. So what secret titans will do is criticize internally.

They have criticisms of other people and how other people aren't measuring up. But it's happening internally, where you can't see it, and they will not compete publicly.

Because they're afraid of disapproval or– They're afraid of failure. Afraid of more shame. They're afraid they won't be up to the mark.

STUDENT 7
It's interesting to think about them in terms of what the realms are pushing away. I don't think I've ever thought in those terms before.

God is pushing away... I forgot what you said.

SHAMBHAVI
Knowledge– you know, recognizing mortality and fragility, illness and old age.

STUDENT 7
Can we go through all of them?

SHAMBHAVI
Mm-hmm.

STUDENT 7
Titan's pushing away [overlapping with SHAMBHAVI] shame.

SHAMBHAVI
Human realm is pushing away the experience of openness.

So human realm wants to categorize, label, and file everything in the correct place so that there's a sense of control of time and space, where there's not this just open quality to life.

Human realm is very future-focused in trying to control what happens in the future. And the openness of time and the openness of space is what it's guarding against.

And then animal realm is guarding against uncontrolled experiences of others. They're very concerned with boundaries because it's guarding against an uncontrolled inter-being, basically.

Then hungry ghost is guarding against loneliness. Hungry ghost really holds kind of pride of place in the sense that we all have some experience of hungry ghost. We all have some experience of loneliness.

And hungry ghost is very tricky because it is not actually trying to stop being lonely. It's trying to continually draw attention to the feeling of loneliness. It's sort of, like, look at this, look at this.

And then hell realm is trying to push away anguish.

STUDENT 8
So what happens when you don't push away those things? Is that what healing a realm is like?

SHAMBHAVI
Yeah. It's, like, sitting in the actual experience without any secondary elaborations is a part of healing. You know, all of the realms are secondary elaborations that are trying to form connection while avoiding certain painful kinds of experiences.

They're all kludgy ways of forming connections.

Kludgy meaning not very elegant, makeshift, not totally effective, but somehow work in a certain way to make a connection while avoiding a pain of some sort. Avoiding suffering of some sort.