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Sufferings: God Realm

• Their core is ignorance. They are ‘self’ satisfied.
• There is no benefit in the god realms. There is no practice.
• Gods have all their wants and needs supplied by a wish-fulfilling tree. They are distracted their whole life. It does not occur to them that they will die. And then they are helpless.
• In the god realms we don’t meet with impermanence and suffering until its too late.
• Gods have double suffering - death and transmigration.
• The kind of happiness that gods have is subject to change.
• When a god dies, they know where they will be reborn in the lower realms. And they know how difficult it is to be liberated.
• You can only go down when you die.
• Think about all this. Samsara is something you want to turn away from, something that is not attractive.

• Long-lived gods: There is nothing in this realm except endless space. It is like night-sky without stars, or a coal-mining town. This is not the realm of Shravakas where the buddhas radiate light. It is not the bardo, where there are perceptions/mental formations. Long-lived gods have a mental [dream-like] body, but they are mentally blank, like being in a dreamless sleep. They have the wrong view of believing that liberation is a mentally blank state. These beings can live for many, many aeons [in the Heaven of Fourth Concentration] without doing virtue or non-virtue. They don’t have suffering. There is no perception of happiness or suffering. Suffering comes later, when their virtue is exhausted and they fall into the lower realms. Their long life is the real disadvantage. Buddhas can come and go, and they would still be in their realms.