Concerning Death, Hell And Illumination

I visited hell in a dream last night. It was a very orderly place. You had to register and wait to be taken to the table where the person you wanted to see was waiting. It was a place of endless waiting.

I was visiting a friend who committed suicide. He wasn’t in hell because he died by his own hand, but because he had lived a totally self-centered life and had completely given up on life.

Not that he was being punished either. Surprisingly, there was no punishment in hell. Nor chaos, or any of the projected aspects of human hellishness on earth. There was just the emptiness of nihilism.

Socrates said, “Death is one of two things. Either it is annihilation, and the dead have no consciousness of anything; or it is really a change: a migration of the soul from this place to another.”

Apparently, some don’t quite make the transition to one place or another.

Some years ago when I was visiting my native state I stopped in to see my first girlfriend. It had been nearly 20 years, and Carla had lived a dissolute life. I took her to lunch. Fittingly, in retrospect, she chose a strange restaurant where we ate in a back room without windows.

After years of methodless meditation, one can sense things, and suddenly, as we were talking after eating, I felt presences around us. “What are all these dead people around you?” I asked.

Without batting an eye, Carla replied, “Oh, they’re always around me.”

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It matters how we live, and how we die. Not because of some religious injunction threatening hell, but because life’s a stage for learning. That accords with the “No-hiding theorem” of quantum mechanics, which maintains that information is never lost, even with black holes.

I’m not trying to stand on science with respect to death, or give science primacy in these questions, as is the fashion these days. Besides, there’s a great irony in the scientific worldview that insists, despite the law that information is never lost, that death is annihilation.

The lines from the Bhagavad-Gita ring true:

For that which is born death is certain, and for the dead birth is certain. Therefore grieve not over that which is unavoidable.

Taking it a step further, that means, as the great religious teacher and philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti said, “Reincarnation is a fact, but not the truth.”

I understand that to mean that reincarnation happens, but ending the necessity of returning to unlearn and leave the polluted stream of the known is the truth of existence. In short, when we no longer need to return, we incarnate rather than reincarnate.

That fits with insights during complete meditations in nature. In a deeper state of meditation, the separation between life and death (which is made only by the mind of man dividing death from life) ends. One feels, without fear but rather ecstasy, the actuality and omnipresence of death, which is occurring within and around us every moment.

What then to make of my dream, in which I compassionately visited my friend in hell? Again, hell is not a place of punishment, or even suffering, just nihilistic emptiness, and waiting.

Waiting for what? Marking time in waiting is not patience, but a kind of hell. So perhaps hell is simply a place where people who have been utterly self-centered and done unrepentant evil cannot return, and must simply wait for the ultimate fate of humanity to be determined. They cannot reincarnate to cleanse themselves, and undertake the journey of illumination, and leave the world a better rather than worse place for having lived.

Whether these things are true or not, there is much more going on with life and death than we know or can ever know. Even illumined human beings never stop non-cumulatively learning.

One thing is for certain -- it is utterly false to say, “A gaze that is infused with love, purity and sincerity is incapable of seeing any evil in the world.”

That isn’t just a denial of the truism, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.” It’s a complicit prescription for a willful lack of discernment. And it’s the kind of New Age claptrap that has made so many people purblind to their own darkness and the darkness that now saturates human consciousness.

It is deeply mistaken to gloss over evil with fey love, within or without.

It’s only by facing and continuously learning from the darkness within us that we dissolve it, and thereby do our part to end the rule of evil in the world.

Then we may act non-violently in response to the hellishness of this world, or simply stand against it.

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