5

THE PATH TO HELL

“I WONDER IF Yama fools himself?” Ramana mused. “He certainly fools everyone else.”

“You talk as if he’s pulling some kind of trick,” Savitri said. It was wearing on her to be in the forest this long. She knew that time was running out.

“Yama is pulling a trick,” Ramana agreed. “You wouldn’t have run away from him if you’d known it.” Ramana stopped, as if he had pronounced something obvious.

“Show me how the trick works,” Savitri said.

“All right. I’ll tell you the story of a monkey who was shut inside a small room in a castle tower. Nothing was happening in the room, and the monkey was restless.

“The monkey could only divert himself by going to the window and looking out at the world. This distracted him for a while, but then he started to think about his situation. How did he end up in this tower? Why had he been captured and put there? The monkey’s mood began to darken. There was nothing to do, no one to talk to. His thoughts made him more and more depressed. The room seemed to close in; the monkey started to sweat anxiously. No, he suddenly realized, I’m not in a room, I’m in hell. Quickly his depression grew into anguish and anguish into torment. The monkey saw demons all around inflicting every imaginable pain.

“This is it, the monkey thought. I am in eternal hell. And so the torment continued, getting worse and worse. The monkey saw no way out. But gradually the monkey got used to his torment. How much time had elapsed? The monkey couldn’t remember. But he began to feel better about his surroundings. It wasn’t such a bad room, not really. In fact, it was rather pleasant to be by oneself looking out the window at all the fascinating things going on outside.

“Bit by bit the demons stopped torturing the monkey and withdrew. He began to feel better, and soon the day came when he was feeling optimistic. The monkey grew more cheerful, and then …” Ramana broke off. “No doubt you know where this story is headed.”

Savitri nodded. “The monkey is going to heaven.”

“Exactly. He starts to feel better and better, until he imagines himself in Paradise, and instead of being punished by demons he is being soothed by angels. Ah, the monkey thinks, I am in eternal bliss.”

“Until he gets bored again,” Savitri remarked.

Ramana nodded. “The monkey is the mind, sitting alone in the tower of the head. As the mind expands with pleasure and contracts with pain, it creates every possible world, constantly falling for its own creations. The monkey will believe in heaven for a while, but then boredom will set in, and being the seed of discontent, boredom will pull him out of heaven and back down to hell.”

Savitri felt despondent. “So we’re all trapped.”

“Only if you agree to be trapped. I didn’t say the tower was locked,” said Ramana. “There is an infinite domain outside the castle walls. You can take your mind beyond walls. There is freedom outside, and having achieved it, you will never have to go to heaven or hell again.”

 

KARMA AND THE WAGES OF SIN

So far, I’ve offered a view of the afterlife that is open, creative, and full of choices. Step-by-step we fulfill our expectations and behold images that fit those expectations. But this view leaves out one aspect that looms large for many people: sin. In Christian belief sin cannot be overlooked, since God is constantly adding up our good and bad deeds. He must; otherwise everyone would go to heaven, and its mixture of good and bad people would too closely resemble earthly life.

I saw a Catholic bishop being interviewed on television recently, and he was asked a question that could have been posed to a bishop in the Middle Ages: “Do Christians really believe that this life only exists to prepare us for the life to come?” The bishop’s immediate reply was yes—exactly what a Catholic bishop would have said in the Dark Ages. A thousand years hasn’t changed a basic Christian belief that the material world is a vale of tears, that sin created death, and that the only escape is to reach heaven. “I’ll be at peace when I get there. I’ll be able to relax,” the bishop said. In other words, what we suffer here and now plays a huge part in our image of what’s to come.

Hell is payback for sin, but it’s also an extension of earthly suffering. When escape is the ultimate reward, staying behind is the ultimate punishment. Christian theology basically says, “Be good or God will give you more of this life, only worse.” The Vedic rishis looked at suffering not as a matter of sin but as a matter of lost freedom. According to Vedanta, whatever limits our freedom now will continue to operate after we die. In both cases, you are subject to the power of Karma.

Originally the Sanskrit word Karma meant “action,” but it quickly expanded and now implies the eternal struggle between good and evil. (I will use capital “K” to refer to the cosmic aspect of Karma, small “k” to refer to its personal effects.) At the most superficial level you build good karma by being good and bad karma by being bad. This matches the Christian concept of choosing between good and evil actions, and being rewarded or punished accordingly. Millions of people, East and West, live by that belief. But Karma never ends; it’s part of the soul’s continuous journey, not just a single lifetime that leads once and for all to heaven or hell.

The catch is that no amount of good karma can win a person’s freedom. The Vedic version of hell is never finding a way out of bondage, which makes it strangely congruent to Christian hell. Perfect goodness isn’t achievable, and bit by bit the effect of karma will turn the saint’s life into the sinner’s, and vice versa. That’s why “glue” might be a better translation of Karma than “action.”

You can compare Karma to a cosmic clock with every gear perfectly meshed. You can compare it to a super-computer keeping track of every action in creation. You can compare it to an eternal judge weighing the good and bad results of every thought and deed. In truth the whole system—universe, brain, lower self, higher self, Atman, God—is bound together by Karma’s invisible force. The law of Karma, which underlies every Eastern belief system, holds that none of us can escape paying our debts, and since we accumulate debts every day, we have no choice but to keep paying them off lifetime after lifetime.

Being Saved from Sin

According to the rishis, punishment in the afterlife is the result of unpaid karmic debts. If I commit a crime and don’t pay for it here on earth, I will pay by suffering later. What is a karmic debt? Basically any cause that hasn’t yet found its effect. There’s a saying in India, “Karma waits on the doorstep,” meaning that a person may try to walk away from past actions, but like a dog sleeping by the door until its master returns, Karma can be endlessly patient. Eventually the universe will insist on redressing the balance of wrong with right.

Hell is the condition of karmic suffering. The vast majority of near-death experiences turn out to be positive, but some are not. Instead of moving toward a benign and welcoming light, a few people experience the features of hell. They see demons or even Satan himself; they hear sinners crying out in torment; a heavy blackness looms over everything. NDE investigators have even found a category of people whom they call “earthbound souls,” haunted by evil actions and frustrated desires. Prime witness to this was offered by a man named George Ritchie, who was given a firsthand look at them:

In Ritchie’s near-death experience, Jesus took him to a large city on earth where he observed earthbound souls stalking the living for one reason or another. One earthbound soul begged in vain for a cigarette. A young man who had committed suicide begged his parents in vain for forgiveness. In a house, Ritchie was shown the soul of a boy following a living teenage girl and begging for forgiveness despite the fact that the girl was completely unaware of the boy’s presence. Jesus told Ritchie that the boy had committed suicide and was chained to every consequence of his act.

These are the ghosts of unpaid karma. It’s worth remembering that hellish experiences don’t depend upon dying. People have seen Satan in dreams, visions, imagination, and even in the flesh (or inside the flesh, if you believe in demonic possession and Satan’s ability to take up his abode in a person’s body until he is somehow exorcised).

NDE investigators are among the few in our society whose job is to think about the afterlife, and when they consider any experience of hell or tormented souls, certain factors create these visions of torment. Our minds put us in hell, and they can take us out again. Whether suffering is created here on earth through physical pain or in the afterlife through psychological torment, the causes remain the same, since they can be traced back to the workings of Karma. Every culture believes that bad deeds are inescapable in the afterlife, but the rishis opened the picture to describe how torment can be escaped in general.

On the material level it’s not self-evident that “as you sow, so shall you reap.” Wrongdoing escapes notice, much less punishment, all the time. We all harbor a fantasy of a life where we can get away with anything. It’s strong enough to turn bank robbers into heroes, for example, at least in movies.

By saying that bad karma will one day catch up with wrongdoers, are we guilty of wish fulfillment? Skeptics would certainly say yes, because if a karmic debt is paid outside the material world, it isn’t being paid at all. The matter can’t be easily settled, but in spiritual terms we can observe the difference between someone who is mature—and by implication has paid off some debts—and someone who is immature, loaded down with unpaid debts. The spiritually mature person pursues a meaningful life through the following:

Self-worth: I matter in the divine plan, I am unique in the universe.

Love: I am deeply cared for and care for others deeply.

Truth: I can see past illusions and distractions.

Appreciation and gratitude: I cherish the fits of creation.

Reverence: I can feel and see the sacred.

Nonviolence: I respect life in all its forms.

To live outside these values is painful, and if intense enough, perhaps the pain puts a person in hell. So the value of a meaningful life demonstrates the hidden side of karmic debts: when you are free of them, your life becomes fulfilled and deeply worth living.

What About Satan?

Religious Christians will object that I have painted a psychological picture of hell that leaves out Satan. To leave Satan out is to ignore biblical text, which tells us of the angel Lucifer, closest to God among all the angels, who disobeyed God and fell through the sin of pride until he reached the farthest place in creation, hell. That millions of people believe literally in this myth says a great deal about our refusal to take responsibility for the afterlife. We prefer to objectify a Prince of Darkness, an all-powerful opposite of God, who then becomes the agent of all evil.

Taking responsibility for hell sounds awful, but not taking responsibility is the same as giving up on ourselves. Hell is farthest from God because it represents the low ebb of consciousness. The causes of hellish experiences here on earth aren’t merely psychological. They don’t just involve being depressed or guilty. When we become disconnected from ourselves, a sense of deserving to suffer begins. Hell is the suffering you think you deserve. When connections are repaired, we no longer believe we deserve punishment: we are back in the flow of life with all its healing properties.

Everything Satan stands for is included in our own self-judgment. Indeed, he is a massive reflection of self-judgment. Satan is a creation of consciousness, and as such he waxes and wanes, he evolves, and he changes in significance.

Satan is real under the following conditions:

• People feel they deserve punishment instead of healing.
• A culture believes in the Satan myth.
• Believers pay attention to that myth and give it value.
• Guilt is projected outward onto demons instead of healed inside.
• Wrongdoing accumulates without a means for finding forgiveness, atonement, or purification.
• Children are put in fear of demons and told that they have supernatural power.

Satan is unreal under the following conditions:

• People feel they deserve healing instead of punishment.
• A culture is aware of how myths are made.
• People are self-aware and take responsibility for their own emotions.
• There is a belief in forgiveness, healing, and atonement.
• Outlets for negative energies are found (through therapy, sports, open dialogue, healthy family dynamics, education, etc.).
• Children are not conditioned to believe in demons and other supernatural enemies.
• Society promotes the evolution of consciousness.

Our culture has largely moved beyond Satan, because despite religious literalists, we have a century of secularism behind us. Whatever its faults, which can be glaring, secular culture has promoted therapy, discouraged superstition, given people responsibility over their own destinies, and encouraged open-minded dialogue in every area once considered taboo. These are considerable achievements; they bespeak tremendous growth in consciousness. Evil, however you define it, remains even after Satan is gone, but removing our attention from Satan has diminished him greatly, just as the ancient gods of Mount Olympus, once so powerful that they served to explain every natural phenomenon, are now relegated to history.

Like the Greek gods, Satan has outlived his usefulness. When people find a better explanation for any phenomenon, the old explanation withers away—meteorology replaces Aeolus the god of wind, and thermodynamics replaces Promethean fire. We have the power to make Satan grow or diminish. In fact, we have the power to make him real and unreal, which is far more crucial.

As consciousness evolves, Satan will become more unreal. Already I believe there are millions of people who are ready to stop talking about demons, sin, and cosmic evil as the root cause of suffering. They are ready to talk in terms of consciousness. They are ready to talk about being disconnected from themselves. We have spent centuries calling upon God to rescue us and fearing Satan as the supreme enemy. Perhaps this was necessary to our evolution, but now we can turn to the deeper, more humane wisdom of the rishis, which speaks of one reality, not a fractured universe with heaven and hell at opposite poles.

Good and evil, the rishis tell us, is a direct function of being connected to the soul. The soul is the most real aspect of the self. When we break our connection with the soul, we lose touch with reality.

THE SOUL IS DISGUISED WHEN …

• You are too tired or stressed.
• You are pulled outside yourself.
• Your attention is dominated by externals.
• You let others think for you.
• You act out of compulsion.
• You are influenced by fear and anxiety.
• You struggle and suffer.

These conditions have to change before the soul connection can be reestablished. Death provides access to the domain of the soul, but Vedanta declares that the soul has a great deal to offer before death. Life is conducted under the gaze of the soul. Your portion of pure consciousness has certain universal qualities:

• It is constant.
• It never loses sight of you.
• It is connected to every other soul.
• It shares God’s omniscience.
• It is untouched by change.
• It lives beyond time and space.

So it isn’t only tender, loving, quiet moments that reveal the soul. Rather, it’s those moments when the soul’s own qualities come to the surface that are most important. Such moments occur too rarely in modern lives, but the soul never stops revealing itself.

THE SOUL IS REVEALED WHEN …

• You feel centered.
• Your mind is clear.
• You have the sensation that time has stopped.
• You suddenly feel free of boundaries.
• You are keenly self-aware.
• You feel merged with another person, either in love or silent communion.
• You feel untouched by aging and change.
• You feel blissful or ecstatic.
• You have an intuitive flash that turns out to be true.
• You somehow know what is going to happen.
• You sense the truth.
• You feel supremely loved or absolutely safe.

If there is only one reality, as the rishis declare, then life is not a struggle between good and evil, but a tangled web where all actions, good and bad, move us closer to reality or deeper into illusion. Karma spins the web. Karma isn’t a prison, it’s a field of choice. Karma keeps our choices honest. We sow what we reap, but this is far from saying that we are trapped by the forces of cosmic good and evil. Hell, like every other location in consciousness, ultimately reflects the state of our own awareness, and freedom from hell is won, like every other achievement, by coming closer to the reality of the soul.