Buddhist and Hindu sages agree: obtaining a human birth is “precious” and “rare.”

“It’s best to be human,” we often hear from our teachers.

What’s so great about being human? Doesn’t it suck most of the time?

Well, if we come from the West, we’re used to arguments about the greatness of human reason, language, and culture. But this is not what’s so great about humans from a Tantrik or spiritual perspective.

What’s great about being born in the human realm is that it’s the best realm for doing sadhana or spiritual practice. This is what the teachers mean when they talk about the preciousness of human birth.

Beings who are not yet realized come in six general flavors, or as we like to say in the biz: six realms. These are god, titan, human, animal, hungry ghost, and hell realm.

Each of these realms expresses ignorance (non-realization) in a different way.

Let’s take the least obvious realm first: deva or god realm. Here, we are not talking about the Mahadevas such as Ganesha, Shiva, Sarasvati, and so on. We are talking about a range of beings who have more subtle bodies than humans and who are addicted to pleasure and bliss.

A human being can also express a god realm fixation. Some people in spiritual traditions are “god realmers.” They cannot feel the reality of their own suffering and are in a state of fantasy bliss. Everything is always “wonderful” and “amazing.” At the extreme end, a person may have fantasies of being Christ, or some other high being.

This brings me to the main reason why the human realm is the best for doing sadhana. Beings who actually express one or another of the realms full-time–in other words–beings who fully embody one of the realm fixations, are stuck in a rut with the limitations of that realm.

On the other hand, most human beings are dabblers in all of the realm fixations. In fact, we can visit every kind of fixation in five minutes flat. We suffer from a smorgasboard of limitations, but most of us are just grazing.

Human realmers can run away from pain by fantasizing that we are higher beings, unaffected by ordinary life (god realm).

We can cover up feelings of worthlessness by jealously criticizing and competing with other people (titan realm).

We can try to tie the entire world up in the stories and explanations we call “knowledge” (human realm).

We can hide out in states of numbness, anesthetizing our pain with sleep, sex, and food (animal realm).

We can try to suck love and pity out of our friends and relations (hungry ghost realm).

And instead of taking responsibility for ourselves, we can blame others for our condition and lash out in anger and revenge (hell realm).

If it’s a fixation, we’ve been there.

Human realmers hop between one realm and another. There are more gaps in our expressions of our limitations. Although we all tend to have a favorite realm or two, we are a little more fluid and flexible than other kinds of realm beings. This is the grace of being human and what makes the human realm good for doing sadhana. The gaps between our fixations are our opportunities to taste the openness of unconditioned life, or flowing presence. We learn to recognize and relax into these gaps through our practice.

Some human beings do hang out a lot in one realm. They find it much harder to gain a perspective on their fixations. Those of us with a more eclectic relationship to the realms tend to be able to self-reflect, and even laugh at our foibles. These are essential capacities for anyone doing spiritual practice.

Human beings, as the Kularnava Tantra tells us, also have an auspicious form of embodiment for doing sadhana. We have beautiful senses and dexterous limbs. While our ears are not as keen as those of bats, and we are not as swift as cougars, we have a wider range of physical capacities. We can do thousands of forms of ritual. We can work concretely with our health and relax karmas that would be harder to address in other realms, or with other forms of embodiment. We can participate in both gross and subtle forms of mantra. We can visualize.

Other beings have some of these capacities, but humans have a little of everything. We have many tools available to us, and making use of these tools to Self-realize is the best use of a precious human life.

In Matriseva,
Shambhavi

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