Hidden Treasure

In the darkest waters, without a life raft, losing strength of inner purpose and yet recognizing that far from the end being near, this hell world is endless. No hope, no help, no understanding. Adrift yet without the dreaminess of drifting, senses are sharply acute, overstimulated by sounds, sensations, and thoughts with both body aches and body dullness. Heat to the point of burning or cold to the point of freezing. Dry as dust and dripping with the rot of lost dreams, there is no relief. There is an urgent need to escape yet that need is accompanied by the piercing recognition of no possible escape. Inner torture is perpetuated by memories of what once was accompanied by vainly searching for the prevention of what is.

Hell is not madness, although it is filled with elements of madness. It is not delusional, although there are inner torments that mimic delusions. There is a stark clarity in the descent, with both fear of madness and willingness for it to be madness, for with true madness there is the possibility of a treatment. A treatment means hope.

Hell is a hopeless desert of the soul, even while external functioning may keep hell’s deeply personal suffering from the general view. A nightmare surely, but each day reveals that the nightmare is waking as well as sleeping. A depression, a psychotic episode, a spiritual emergency, a dark night of the soul, or simply reality? Whatever label is placed on this experience is limited and finally of no use.

How did we find ourselves here? Was there warning? If so what could we have done to avoid it? What in the universe generates such a space and why? How could any benevolence anywhere allow such inner suffering?

Where there were friends, there are now only adversaries. Where there was space there is now sticky confinement. Where there was certainty of a continuing future of possibility, there is now the prison of damnation to this dire, impoverished present.

Like most people who reach adulthood, I have been through some hells in my life. The first I can recall was when I was six. I had been sick with a childhood fever and was napping in Mama and Daddy’s bed. When I awoke, I could hear my new baby sister crying. The crying was terrifyingly loud. Even though she and my parents were downstairs and I was upstairs, the crying—screaming really—filled the room. I became very, very frightened and ran into the big closet to hide. I don’t know how long I stayed hidden, but finally the terror passed and I had the nerve to go downstairs. The family was gathered around the kitchen table. There was no crying or screaming now, and they welcomed me into the gathering. I asked about the crying, but no one could recollect anything remarkable about the baby and her crying.

After that mysterious event, I began to have more terrifying experiences. Simple noises would get very loud and terrify me. Then I would feel my body disappearing. First it would go through a series of alternating sizes, from huge to hair-thin. As I felt it begin to disappear altogether, I would run for help. My mother was no help. She was as confused by my horror as I was, but we had a wonderful maid, Susie, who became my refuge. I would put my head between her ample breasts, she would hold me close, and I would feel safe again. My “fit” would pass.

However the experience is categorized—anxiety attack and out-of-body experience are the diagnoses I have at different times applied to it—it was pure hell for me at the time. We each have our versions of hell, and perhaps they are similar in their horror.

In our teaching story, the hell realm was evoked by losing a life of bounty. But hell realms are not limited to material deprivation. Hell claims its population from all strata. In the wealthiest and most powerful societies there are as many suffering from personal hells as in the poorest. Although having our basic needs met provides protection from the hell of poverty, there is no real protection from our inner hell realms.

For our purpose of deep inquiry and investigation, it is in the inner realms of hell that we discover the most essential truths. For fight our inner hell as we might, it is relentless with its internal lashings that are all the more brutalizing in their invisibility.

Hell is the most dangerous of inner realms because we can be tempted to give up our souls here just for the possibility of release. Or we can learn to dully survive in hell without receiving the ruthless teaching that hell has to offer. We can attempt bribing our notions of a god with promises of being a better person, we can swear to ourselves that we have learned our lessons, we can grovel before some inner Satan to try to get at least a better position on some rung of hell, but to truly receive the teaching of hell, we have to be still in the midst of its misery.

When there is some degree of willingness to look into the maw of hell rather than to follow the natural instinct to flee, there is the capacity to discover the deepest teachings. The deepest teachings, by their very nature of being the deepest, must be able to be found anywhere. Hell is where we don’t want to have to look.

Throughout history we have received reports from those who have descended into the belly of this beast. Great artists of all mediums, great mystics certainly, and ordinary people like each of us have experienced at least the rim of hell. From Christ’s bleeding suffering and wail of forsakenness to the paintings of Goya with their gruesome proof of the hell of war to the stark eyes of tortured prisoners as they “confess,” we recognize that which we most fear. The painful suffering of anyone whose world has collapsed in the face of loss of any kind—as well as the mysterious onslaught of inner collapse with no external cause—finally proves to us that hell is a common and horrendous fact of life.

Since to live life truly and fully all of life must be met intimately, what is it that our hell has to teach us? What do we learn from empathizing with a crucifixion? What do we learn when recognizing the horrors we as a species and as individual humans are capable of from Goya’s paintings? Often we don’t learn. Perhaps a savior does appear and as good people we are released. Or maybe we find ourselves miraculously delivered into tranquil rest. But when we don’t learn, we are haunted by the memories, however hidden they seem. And, more important, we can learn. We can open our minds even in hell. We can discover the truth of what remains changeless in the worst circumstances.

Psychological literature is filled with descriptions of the pathologies of hell along with the current recommended treatments of choice. But the psychological approach is usually one of discovering or assisting escape and relief. This approach is certainly appropriate and recommended until you are ready and able to actually learn what hell has to teach. For discovery in hell we have the extraordinary good news of Christ’s surrender and ascension. We have the exquisite poetic expression of union with the divine under the most grueling and degrading circumstances from Saint John of the Cross. We have Ramana as a sixteen-year-old boy willing to meet death. We have joyous testimony of those who have “crossed to the other side” in every spiritual or religious tradition. You have yourself, to the degree you are willing to be taught by whatever hell you may find yourself in.

For some, hell is sustained over a period of years or even decades. For many it lasts for weeks or months. For some it appears, disappears for a while, and then reappears. Some are haunted by the memory and possibility of its return. Some generate a quasi-hell as a kind of living amulet to keep the real hell at a distance. Some sense its presence underneath the relative peace of a prosperous and conflict-free life. Some have heard of it through religion, and fear their damnation into it. Some have scoffed at the notion of it until they have experienced it firsthand. I have never met anyone who has not at least tasted hell.

The taste is enough to send one running—into numbness, into feverish practice of rites and rituals, into inner nightly calculations of the likelihood of that day’s actions sending one deeper into hell.

Hell usually makes its unavoidable presence known by appearing unannounced and unexpected. The periods of our lives that are uneventful or supportive can lull us into a self-absorption so narcotic that we don’t imagine that destiny has anything other than good for us. In spite of religious teachings and subconscious tastes and nightmares, we really can’t imagine the bitter medicine of hell until it appears.

How long can we bear it? If we are resisting it, our capacity is limited and we have to get help. Drugs, sleep, distraction, and support and love from friends and counselors all have their place in the natural need for distraction from this internal war with an immutable force. But if we aren’t at war with hell? If we are actually—even for a millisecond—willing to be at peace in the midst of this tremendous misery, an immeasurable capacity is discovered. In this millisecond of surrender, quite different from resignation, light is discovered in darkness.

How many hells and mini-hells have we already been through? Perhaps the time spent being born, being thrust from the womb, is our first experience of hell. What infant hells are being experienced when hunger is not immediately satisfied? And the times when babies are miserable for no apparent reason? Maybe those early preverbal cries are our first bodily experiences of abandonment in need. Most of us have memories of periods in our lives that were experiences of internal hells. Perhaps some degree of hell has always accompanied birth and growth, or the next step. An aspect of the invitation of this book is to consider hell a natural part of our human experience. As such it can be directly met and investigated.

If hell is considered natural, though certainly unlikable—like a particularly severe winter or a miserably hot, crop-killing summer—we remove the stigma of damned from it. Without this superstitious judgment, we are much closer to finding the courage and capacity to open our minds to receive hell’s teaching. Being aware of our learned superstitions is an important part of seeing how we fabricate our version of reality and are then bound by that fabrication. Our superstitions often work underneath our thought process, but fear of unexplained reality always supports our superstitious tendencies. If we are willing to open our minds when fear is felt, we no longer need the protection of our beliefs. When we are willing to cast aside our superstitions, we are willing to face reality directly.

When we take a larger perspective, we can see that there are periods of better times and periods of worse times, in both our inner and our outer worlds. And if some hell periods are certainly the result of foolish or mistaken behavior, there are just as many that arise with no known cause. Surprise attack. As in our teaching story, out of the blue.

In a true meeting, which is a true investigation and true inquiry, our prior ideas of the meaning of an experience have to be suspended. Our concepts and evaluations about the causes of a feeling or an emotion have to be put aside if we are to get to the essence of that feeling or emotion. We have to be open to really not know why. When we are willing to not know, we can more fully open our minds and with conscious intelligence inquire into and discover.

Most of our concepts and judgments of hell, or even of the minor negative emotions that assert themselves throughout the experience of life, have to do with proving that we are essentially bad, or doomed, or permanently flawed in some irrevocable way. We have been taught this by parents, school systems, religions from the East and the West, and by our own internal idealization of the purified being we hope we can be. This mass of conditioning is only in the way when real investigation is needed. And real investigation is needed when we are willing to hear what any deep experience, especially hell, has to teach.

How do we meet or investigate what is by its nature terrifying, unlovable, abysmal, and liable to swallow us into its muck? The “how” is actually simple. The real challenge is the motivation. Why would we even want hell’s teaching when we can distract ourselves with so many options, or at least cover our heads and wait for it to pass?

We are ready to meet the worst (hell) in ourselves only when we are ready to be free. Before that readiness we will hide from the worst, or dramatize the worst with a tragic melancholy. Or we may deny it altogether. The thinking process of our brain is filled with powers that allow us to decorate reality or dodge and cover whatever may threaten our version of reality. These powers are to be admired and used creatively until we really want to live freely. Then we must recognize that what keeps us in inner bondage is our fear of what exists in the naked core. If we have been secretly frightened by our unknown inner beingness, and if we have been taught that our inner nature must be tamed into submission because of its potential for selfish evil, we will keep our conscious attention separate from and be afraid of the innermost core of ourselves.

Usually even if our upbringing has been more enlightened, and we are taught that we are essentially pure and good, the wild, untamed parts of our personality are likely to frighten us enough that we keep them hidden in shamed secrecy. They show themselves in nightmares and in hell.

To be willing to turn toward “them”—“them” being the aspects of ourselves that we separate from our outward self-image—is the mark of maturity, which is the readiness to be free. Not free of “them,” but free of all inner and outer definitions of what “they” are. When we are free of our conceptual definitions of ourselves, we are free to be fully whole. We then directly know ourselves as undefined, indefinable consciousness, freely being itself. When we are willing and ready, hell is one of the most important teachers to point to that freedom.

In our teaching story, members of the family in hell turn on one another in frustration and blame. The radical notion to stop the blaming and complaining and to simply descend into the experience of hell in the spirit of open investigation doesn’t occur to them. Instead they seek release in turning on one another, and in that turning, they sink deeper into the mire.

This is a familiar habit known to us all. When the unbearable appears in the world, rather than face the worst and explore it directly and freely, we attack what is nearest us. We vent our frustrations with the agony of the circumstances on others through blame and irritability. Our helplessness feels unendurable, and finding a scapegoat is the age-old strategy of momentarily feeling some sense of control.

The shallowness of our teaching story family shows us the futility of our own strategies to avoid our worst fears through aggressive displays of power. Until we are aware of this avoidance, we will continue to refuse responsibility for our circumstances. We will continue to find someone or something to blame. We will blame other people, the planets, our genes, God, and the devil. We will blame anything to release the pressure of hell. In the disbelief and horror of our circumstances, we prefer conspiracy theories to the openness of simply and directly discovering what the worst is made of.

When there are no outside others to blame, we internally fragment and attack ourselves. All of the blaming and attacking is a futile attempt to make sense of or control the horror of the suffering. Deflecting and blaming may take the pressure off for a moment or two, but in the process it sinks us deeper into the ignorance of hell.

Being able to respond is identical to being able to investigate. Both require openness and willingness to stop whatever story we are consciously or subconsciously weaving about why this horror has happened and who is to blame. Initially it certainly may be necessary to discover both why and who, because we intelligently want to know the causes of abysmal circumstances. But in direct investigation of what is in this moment and what it can reveal, the sole concern must be what is. This is when the clear response is the direct investigation. The focus is fully on the moment itself, regardless of the level of suffering or the causes of that suffering. The response is the question, “What is this I am experiencing as hell?”

Although the family never gets to this level of maturity, you can if you tell the truth to yourself. Do you want to be free? At some stages in our lives we don’t even know or care what true freedom is. All we want is protection and attention. We want a safe cocoon where we can simply live and grow. There is nothing wrong with this. All creatures go through stages where without protection and attention they would not survive. Human children need an extensive protective stage before they are able to survive on their own. In the legitimate immature phase freedom does not serve. All creatures also naturally outgrow this stage as they are called to maturation. Many who have outgrown the protective stage still cling to the security of the cocoon. Sometimes young eagles even have to be forcibly pushed by their parents from the protective nest to learn to fly. There is surely at least an instant of hell between losing everything, falling, and then finally flying.

At the dawning of spiritual maturity, as in biological maturity, a push or even a shock is often necessary to provide the catalyst for essential growth. The birth of true knowing follows the death of the previously known. What was previously known may have been true in its time, but when finished becomes false knowing or ignorance.

It is not always so easy as to simply put away what we have outgrown. We don’t often choose to leave a protected place. Although some things are easily put aside or easily fall away on their own, transformational leaps take us, or throw us, into unknown territory with no reference points. The baby eagle may or may not have noticed that his survival depended on his protectors flying back and forth with his nourishment. Flying may never have been considered in his baby bird brain. Likewise, we may have never noticed that throughout time, in all cultures there have been sublime examples and stories of living freely. Spiritual nourishment prepares us for flying, but we only fly when we take the leap, or are pushed, into the unknown.

We may feel an internal pull toward what is calling us in this unknown realm and be terrified of it at the same time. Or we may ignore the pull altogether until we find ourselves losing what we never considered could be lost—our nest—and desperately fighting the unknowability we are left with. The more we give our attention and life energy to fight the unknown, the more we experience hell.

When we can recognize that the soul matures naturally and sometimes with pain, we can be more willing to recognize the space between one phase and the next. Usually we desperately try to cling to what no longer is, or deny that we have lost everything we know, or attack those around us in anger and fear. We overlook the spaciousness in the shift between one reality of life and another. If the baby eagle doesn’t resist falling then the moment of falling before flying is just as sweet as flight. If we don’t resist whatever is being experienced, then the underlying sweetness of life is found even in the most bitter parts.

We can’t know beforehand that even in the worst the best can be discovered. But we can discover the truth of that. We can try to remember our discovery for whenever the next change occurs, and that memory may be somewhat useful. But to directly know what is here in this moment, all memory—even the most supportive—must be put aside. When you put aside your memory of the past, there is no projection of future. Without past and future, your attention is fully present here, in this moment, regardless of what is appearing here. Even definitions of hell come from references to the past and hopes or fears for the future. When your mind is freed from definitions of any kind, you can easily and directly discover what is really here, rather than cling to any definition of what is here. Falling with surrender is naturally floating.

So that you can tell the unvarnished truth, the following points of inquiry are offered here for you alone. As spiritual seekers we know what we should think and feel. And we may even know, or remember, that the naked truth is silent open awareness. But this knowledge is worse than useless if there is no immediate, fresh, and ongoing direct experience of that knowledge. These questions have no “correct” answers. The questions are designed merely to direct your conscious attention into both the structure and substructure of your particular story and finally into the alive, silent awareness that is underneath all structures.

I recommend you give yourself time and space for these questions. You may want to write down the answers as you ask yourself the questions aloud. You may want to repeat all or particularly potent questions many times to discover unsuspected answers. All of the questions are open-ended. Answers to them can appear over time in different circumstances.

And you may find your own unique questions. If so, be aware that “why” questions lead to analysis, processing, and more mental activity. While this type of questioning is useful in many circumstances, in direct investigation “who” or “what” questions are more fruitful for fresh discoveries.

QUESTIONS FOR INQUIRY:

1. What is hell?

2. What does it mean about you that you find yourself in hell?

3. Who put you in hell?

4. Leaving behind all definitions, can you allow your attention to be inside the energy field or vibration of the experience of hell?

5. What is at the core of this experience?

6. Is there anything under that?

7. Under that?

When you have given yourself all the time you need, it may be helpful if you take a few moments to lie down and simply experience what has been evoked by both questions and answers. If you suspend all judgments and conclusions about any of your responses or any feelings evoked, what is here?