Chapter 11 (Realms of Existence)

The world makes no sense, so why are we here?

The world we are in makes no sense. We live in impermanent bodies that are destined to fail. The impermanence itself makes it an imperfect existence. However, on top of that we have our fabricated existences, with the made-up self-identities that we cling to. All this produces a world that while it may have some nice things in it to distract us is imperfect to the core and not on balance a nice place. One can accept these as just being facts of existence but wouldn’t we like to know why these facts are the way they are? In other words, why we are here? What is the purpose of this existence if it has one and if this world was created by design why was it designed to be the imperfect world that it is?

Origen of Alexandria

In what would become canonical Western Christian thinking God is good and a good God wouldn’t make a world that is not good. Yet, it seems like we have a world that is not. Origen of Alexandria (185-253 CE) was an early Christian theologian, who speculated on how to make sense of this situation from the point of view of Christian salvation, i.e., that one returns to God through Christ. Origen’s motivations seem to have come from his being troubled by the seeming unfairness of the world. Individuals are born in vastly different circumstances. They have such different opportunities to follow the Christian path to salvation. Some aren’t even exposed to the teachings of Christ, so what opportunity could they have to return to God through Christ.

Origen speculated that perhaps rather than being created and then being born on earth for the first time, all souls were originally created by God in heaven. However, God gave those souls free will. While they existed in heaven some made good choices and followed the righteous path while others made bad choices. When it became time to be born on earth, souls were born into different circumstances depending on the choices they had made. Those who made good choices were born into good circumstances and had ample opportunity to follow the path to God through Christ. Those which had made bad choices were not born into good circumstances and it would be difficult for them to follow Christ. Thus, birth into an earthly existence was like karma. One was born into circumstances that one had chosen based on prior acts. Being born into a good or bad existence wasn’t good or bad luck, one had chosen it. However, based on passages in the Bible, Origen thought that all souls would eventually return to God and sit next to their creator through a process that would seem to require reincarnation making his views heretical to the established church.

Could we be in a cage?

Clearly our circumstances in this life set limits on what we can know. Forgetting about whether knowing Christ is important or not, whatever tradition we are born into sets limits on what we can know. If knowledge is the path to liberation or salvation, then not everyone has equal access. Some have broader access to knowledge and some have greater capacity to process knowledge. Both are factors that are largely not controlled by the individual.

Can we extend this to beyond the human realm? Let us for a moment step outside our existence and consider the case of a rat in a cage in a research lab. Suppose this was a very thoughtful rat and it asked the question “why am I here?” The rat might know he was in an enclosure. He would realize food and water was provided and that from time-to-time human investigators might take him out of the cage to perform experiments. However, even the most thoughtful rat is not going to get very far discovering the real answer as to why he is where he is. He doesn’t have enough information. He doesn’t understand that he is part of an experiment. He hasn’t read the protocol and is unfamiliar with the research question. He doesn’t know that he was born in captivity and that there is a larger world out there where other rats live in vastly different circumstances. The investigators are controlling his fate but he can’t know that and he doesn’t know their agenda. In short, he can’t make sense of it all.

However, perhaps our situation is not that different from the rat. Suppose we are in a cage but don’t know it, a much bigger cage to be sure with a more complex environment. We are controlling the environment of others like the rat but above us what if there are others who are controlling us and have their own agenda. Since we are not privy to the agenda of those controlling us, the world makes no sense to us. Our situation is being controlled by a larger existence above us that has its own agenda but we don’t know what that agenda is.

How do we know we are not in a dream or a computer simulation?

The Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (4^th century BCE) asked the first question in the form of the butterfly dream. Once upon a time, Zhuangzi says he dreamed that he was a butterfly, flying here and there, sensing that he was a butterfly, being conscious only of his happiness as a butterfly, and unaware of his other self. Once he awoke, he was himself again. But at this point how was he to know whether he was a man who had been dreaming that he was a butterfly, or a butterfly, now dreaming that he was a man.

A modern variation on this problem has been put forth by the philosopher Nick Bostrom (born 1973) and is known as the simulation argument. It asks the question how do we know that we are not in a computer simulation? The argument goes something like this. Our mental life while we are in human bodies is dependent on the brain. Our senses pick up signals from the environment and transform these signals into electrical activity in the brain. Through our brains we react to those electrical signals as representing the physical world we are in. However, suppose it was possible to create a device that could flood the brain with artificially generated signals replacing those coming from the external world. With this device hooked up to our brains, it would be possible to hijack the brain and create a simulated world in the mind of an individual. One could be made to see a tree or a bus or have any type of experience and would react to those signals as if they were real. A computer could be programmed using artificial intelligence (AI) to generate electrical responses which the individual would perceive as real.

Imagine this process was started in infancy, just as an infant’s brain starts out simple and then becomes wired based on real world experience, the infant’s brain could become wired using artificial intelligence generated algorithms. Whole lives could be lived in a computer simulation. The movie “The Matrix” explores a theme something like this.

Let’s further suppose that there is one real universe and the technology exists to create such a device which can create fake universes. If the technology did, there wouldn’t be just one created, there would be many, probably hundreds, thousands. It is possible that computer simulated worlds haven’t been developed in which case we don’t need to worry about this. But what if they have? If there is only one real universe and thousands of simulated ones, then we almost certainly live in one of the computer simulated universes now.

You might ask why would one want to create a simulated universe? One answer is you could do simulated experiments of what might happen if history had been changed. You could create a simulated world like it was before the battle of Waterloo and then ask what if Napoleon’s armies had won at Waterloo? How would that have changed the course of European history?

Who is controlling us?

Then who is controlling us? It must be some “thing” bigger than us at least in the sense of being more powerful than us even if not physically bigger. It probably lives longer than we do although it doesn’t necessarily have an infinite lifespan. It probably doesn’t depend on air or food in the same way that we do. On balance it sounds like a God.

Many mystical/philosophical traditions in the West see human birth as a fall from a better place, a Source and it doesn’t seem that preposterous to assume that it is. Plato and Plotinus saw human birth as a fall and that the preferable existence was that outside the cave. This fall in the Jewish/Christian tradition is seen as being caused by the sin of Adam and Eve.

Back to the question of why are we here? Let’s accept that human existence is a fall. We’re some place we would prefer not to be. We’d like to know why we are here but we are like the rat in the cage. We are being controlled by a higher order of control that we have at best indirect knowledge of. What/who would be that higher level of control? The simplest answer would seem to be a realm of gods. Who would those gods be? What gods do we think we know of? Does there necessarily need to be only one God? We know that many gods have been worshipped throughout human history, in eastern and western, ancient and modern traditions.

In Western monotheistic traditions there is only one God and all other gods are seen as false gods. In the East, polytheism is more the rule than the exception. Hinduism has many gods although a handful can be identified as being most important and most individauls owe their allligence to primarily one. The ancient Egyptians and Greeks believed in a plethora of gods. Early Buddhism can be seen as an exception in that the Buddha did not accept the notion of a supreme creator God. However, he did accept the notion of there being a realm of the gods where creatures with enormously long-life spans and extensive powers lived. These gods however differed from immortal supreme gods in that they still existed on the wheel of samsara. Their long lives would eventually end and because it is so difficult to make spiritual progress as a god due to the distractions of the realm, after death, they would almost inevitably fall and be reborn into a lower realm.

One might ask do Jews and Christians worship the same God? I think the consensus would be “yes” they do and that was answer I got when I consulted Google AI online. One might then ask do Jews, Christians and Muslims worship the same God? Again, I think a consensus online view would be that they do and that is the official position of the Roman Catholic church. They are all three Abrahamic religions. They believe in a shared set of prophets which include Abraham and Moses. Christians differ in their belief that Jesus was the son of God and the Messiah. Muslims accept figures like Abraham, Moses and Jesus as legitimate prophets who preached the true message of God. However, believe that the message became corrupted by their followers and Allah sent Mohammed as the final prophet to establish God’s word once and for all.

One could then ask do Hindus and Jews/Christian/Muslims worship the same God? Here I think the clear consensus answer would be “no.” Hinduism although it acknowledges an ultimate Brahman is polytheistic in its belief in multiple individual gods. As noted above, the Buddha did not believe in a supreme creator god. Early Buddhism was non-theistic, although latter Buddhists would come to accept the existence of a plethora of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas who have god-like properties and can be contacted by humans and intervene on their behalf. Other traditions in China, Egypt, Greece, Scandinavia, the cultures in Africa, North and South America would have their own traditions with a belief in gods that seem distinct from other people’s gods.

The realms of existence.

Is there a way to put this all together? It would require adopting a polytheistic view. Interestingly although Judaism now recognizes the existence of only one God, Jews were not always monotheistic. At the time of Moses, Jews were polytheistic in belief but owed their allegiance to and worshipped only one God. There is a story where Moses goes to the Pharoh and asks to be allowed to take his people into the dessert to worship. Why into the desert? The reason was that’s where their God lived. Egyptian gods lived in Egypt. It was only later around the time when the Jews returned from the Babylonian exile that they became monotheistic.

Eastern philosophy speaks of different realms of existence. One formulation is of five realms consisting of gods, demigods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts and hell beings. Each realm is driven by its own primary emotion. Hatred is the driver of those beings who reside in the hell realm. Greed is the root emotion of the hungry ghost realm and ignorance dominates the animal realm. The core emotion of the human realm is jealousy. The primary emotion of the realm of the demi-gods is envy. The god realm is conceptualized as mix of the emotions of the other realms leading to a state of pleasurable distraction as the dominant emotion.

These states are conceptualized as being real physical places where beings reside. They can be further subdivided. For example, there are multiple hell realms with some hot and some cold. These realms however can also be seen as sub-realms within human existence with some people driven by hatred, greed or envy while others manage to live their lives in a world of pleasurable distraction. While dominated by the primary emotion of jealousy the human realm is considered the ideal realm to be born into since it is the realm in which the best opportunity exists to gain the knowledge needed for liberation. Beings in the realm of the gods are intoxicated by their power and access to pleasure. They have little motivation to engage in the kind of spiritual practices that are necessary for liberation. As noted earlier while the gods live long lives they are still on the wheel of samsara and when those long lives eventually end, they almost inevitably fall down into a lower realm. The mortality of the gods has implications for the people on earth that they may have established relationships with since the gods of ancient peoples may no longer be alive today.

The realm of the demi-gods and gods are the best candidates for being above the rat cage that humans live in. Presumably the gods do not have earthly bodies like we do or if they have bodies, these bodies would be of a different type, a spiritual consciousness like ours entangled with a distinct type of body. Perhaps the gods live in their own complex societies having relationships among themselves with some establishing relationships with those in the earthly realm and having special relationships with different groups of people. Do the gods know their situation or are they like us but just in a higher-level rat cage? Maybe some do but for the most part it seems like they are in a higher-level rat cage. One could imagine that there are different hierarchies of gods. Gods over gods. However, this hierarchy at some point has to end, leaving the question of what is above the gods?

References

https://en.wikipedia.org› wiki › The_Matrix

Origen, On First Principles, Christian Classics, Notre Dame, Indiana, 2013.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinproche, The Tiebetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, Snow Lion, Chapter 2 contains a description of the five realms of existence.