All Our Disguises
By Miriam Hall
For a long time, I saw myself as someone almost composed of grief. Due to a lot of early loss in my family – including (but not limited to) both my parents by the time I was 19 – it felt as if being depressed was part of my destiny. I even found a definition of my name, which means “sea of bitterness” or “sea of sorrow,” which only served to reiterate this self-concept.
But then I received other, Buddhist names like “Lotus Warrior” and even “Joyful Golden Light.” I began to do some more research on my name, which is more common in Jewish and Arabic lineages than in the Protestant white culture in which I was raised, and found it can also mean “wished-for child,” “rebellion,” or “lady of the sea.” I spent much of my thirties crawling out of the shell of my previous self-limiting definitions and into a larger world where I began to see that my experiences were not singular (many of us experience much early loss) and that they didn’t have to define me.
One of the ways we can limit our own experience is by clinging to a realm, which in Tibetan Buddhist teachings is usually described as a series of states or places you pass through after death and before rebirth. However, the realms have also come to stand in for psychological states we get stuck in. Each of the six “realm cycles” have a particular flavor, which I will introduce briefly here, and we will cover more deeply in the Karuna Live event on October 9.
The six realms are the God realm, the Jealous God realm, the Human realm, the Hungry Ghost realm, the Animal realm, and the Hell realm. From the initial description, I know it seems like things start pretty well and go downhill from there (from God to Hell, clearly it’s a decline!) but actually, there are problems with the God realm, even though it’s “on top”. One of the places we can see the God realm at play, personally and socially, is by noticing the behaviors of folks who have way more than their basic needs met. While anyone can cause harm, and anyone can have a rough life, the more we move beyond our basic needs being met, the more likely we are not to pay attention to the suffering of others. Not paying attention costs us dearly – our inability to connect with direct compassion, a sense of isolation in the “ivory tower” of our own experience, and a sense of being better than everyone else, which has to be maintained to stay in the perfect-seeming world we find ourselves in.
The realm I got the most stuck in when I was younger and struggling with so much loss, was the Human realm, which is riddled with longing and yearning but also ripe for the development of compassion. While there certainly were echoes of truth in these experiences – I WAS grieving, I WAS often isolated – I also used internalized patriarchy to keep myself isolated and believed in my own story of isolation so much that I missed opportunities to connect to others. Through decades of meditation and contemplative practice, and learning and teaching contemplative psychology (and therapy), I’ve been able to more easily recognize when I am getting stuck and help myself (or ask for help) to get me out of the small cocoon-like world of a realm, and out into the open air.
One way to think of these realms is as if they are costumes – we don the outfits, masks, and mentality of the realm, and then we see the world that way, and others treat us as if we belong there. We become – and make others into - jokers, devils, animals, and more, without realizing it’s all a projection. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that can last seconds or decades, depending on our level of awareness and how much oppression we are facing, much of which is designed to keep us unaware of our own potential and power. Mindfulness and awareness practices can help us see through the layers of trauma and oppression and how they have trapped us in a disguise, so we don’t even recognize our own brilliant nature.
If you are curious to learn more, come to Karuna Live on October 9th or watch for the podcast later in the month. There, we will explore the realms in more depth, seeing where we tend to get stuck and finding the wisdom in these states, along with some tastes of liberation.