Heavens and hells

From chapter 6 of The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe, copyright (c) 2009 by Richard Smoley

One alternative view of the afterlife admits the existence of heavens and hells but does not portray them as infinite. This is the standard doctrine of Buddhism, which says that the six lokas of existence constitute a cycle. As monumental as the sufferings of the hell realms are, they do come to an end. By accumulating good karma, a being climbs up the ladder of these realms until he reaches the heavens of the gods, who are immeasurably long-lived by human standards but not immortal. When their merit has been exhausted, they fall back into the hell realms to start the cycle all over, and so it will continue unless they are freed by enlightenment. The wheel is endless, and we have all followed it from beginning to end in an uncountable series of recurrences. Each of us has been a god, each of us has been in hell countless times. The thirteenth-century Tibetan sage Longchenpa writes:

All the tears you have shed would be more (than the water) in the four oceans,

And the amount of molten metal, foul blood, and excrements

You have consumed when you mind had become a denizen of hell or a spirit

Would not be matched by the rivers flowing to the end of the world.[i]