Pythagoras, The golden verses of Pythagoras, Vol. 2 Philosophia Perennis Chapter 7: A Bold Experiment, Question 2

The second question

Question 2

IS THERE REALLY A HELL?

YOU ARE LIVING IN IT. Hell is a certain psychology; hell is a certain way of looking at things. If you are in misery, that means you are living in hell. Hell is not a geographical place; it is not somewhere underneath the earth: it is in your way of looking at things. It is living in an unconscious way that one creates hell around oneself.

And so is heaven: that too is again a psychology, not something geographical. It is not somewhere above the clouds -- it is not anywhere except in you. These are the two alternatives to live in: to live in hell or to live in heaven. And it is up to you what you choose.

If you live consciously, if you try to bring consciousness to every act that you go through, you will be living in a silent, blissful state, in serenity, in joy, in love. Your life will have the flavour of a festival. That is the meaning of heaven: your life will have many flowers in it, much fragrance will be released through you. You will have an aura of delight. Your life will be a song of life-affirmation, it will be a sacred yes to all that existence is. You will be in communion with existence -- in communion with stars, with the trees, with the rivers, with the mountains, with people, with animals. This whole life and this whole existence will have a totally different meaning for you. From every nook and corner, rivers of bliss will be flowing towards you.

Heaven is just a name for that state of mind.

Hell means you are living so unconsciously, so absurdly, in such contradiction, that you go on creating more and more misery for yourself. And still you ask:

IS THERE REALLY A HELL?

You should not ask it -- you know. You are living in it.

A bedraggled, worried Jew, surrounded by crying children of all sizes, sat in the chaircar of a transcontinental express nursing a baby of about one and a half years. He was spanking the baby, mumbling to himself as he did so:

"Smack, you do it again. Smack, you do it again. Smack, you do it again."

Such seeming cruelty aroused the ire of a motherly woman who sat in the next seat, and she rose, shook her finger in his face and said, "If you strike that baby one more time I will give you so much trouble that you will never forget it!"

The harassed little man paused with uplifted arm and slowly raised his patient eyes to hers. "Lady," he said. "Why lady, my wife is in the baggage coach ahead, she's dead, and I ain't got no place to bury her. And my daughter Rifka is in the Pullman, and she is going to have a baby, and she ain't got no husband. And that kid has just thrown my hat out of the window. And I am on the wrong train and I don't know where I am going. And this baby has ruined my clothes and my baggage is lost. Trouble! Lady, you give me trouble? ME?"

What more proofs do you need that you are in hell? Just watch your life. Just look at your own face in the mirror. What have you done to yourself? It is already hell!

But down the ages we have been thinking that hell is somewhere else -- that creates a deception, that makes you feel as if you are not in hell. And you ARE in it! It is NOT somewhere else. The idea of hell being somewhere else is a strategy created by the priests to deceive you, to make you feel that you are not in it, and to keep you afraid. And they have also created the idea of heaven -- that too is somewhere else, so that it goes on hanging in front of you like a carrot. And you can be pulled, pushed, manipulated, by the priests through greed and fear.

You have been made afraid of hell, you have been made very much greedy for heaven. And because you always think they are somewhere else, you remain deceived.

ALL IS HERE! AND ALL IS NOW! There is no other time than now and no other place than here. Hell is here if you live with a wrong psychology, and heaven is here if you live with a right psychology. But I would like you to know about one thing more....

Heaven and hell are only two sides of your mind. The religions that were born outside India have remained with these two ideas, heaven and hell. They could not rise above them. Judaism, Christianity, Islam -- all the three religions born outside India, have no idea of something transcendental. In India we have a third word MOKSHA, NIRVANA.

Hell is a wrong psychology, ill, abnormal, neurotic, pathological; heaven is a right psychology, normal, healthy. But there is a beyond where you are no more a mind, when both sides of the mind have been dropped, where you are a no-mind, where you are neither negative nor positive, where you are neither dark nor light, where you are neither this nor that -- where you are just a witness to all, to misery and bliss, to all, just a witness, where you are not identified with either misery OR bliss, where hell is a functioning of the mind, and heaven too, and you are beyond both, a watcher on the hills. That state of witnessing, that state of transcendence is called MOKSHA -- freedom, absolute freedom. Freedom from mind is absolute freedom.

I don't teach you heaven, because heaven will always remain with hell; the other side cannot be dropped. If you want to keep one side of the coin, you will have to keep the other side too. If you want to keep the mind, you may be for a few moments in great joy, but again and again moments of sadness will erupt. The other side will have to be recognized.

That's why those who live in the mind go on moving from one polarity to the other. Sometimes they are happy, immensely happy, in heaven, and sometimes they are immensely miserable, in hell. Sometimes great joy and sometimes great sadness; sometimes love and sometimes hate. And they are pulled constantly into these opposite directions.

This is the state. You have also known a few moments of joy and love and happiness, but they come and go; you cannot abide in them, they can't be made eternal. They are only moments. And when they go, you fall back into the deep dark valleys of depression, despair, anguish.

One goes on moving between heaven and hell continuously! Seeing this, watching this deeply, Buddhas have discovered a third standpoint which is beyond mind, which is no-mind, which is freedom from duality. Pythagoras calls it the golden mean. By 'golden mean' he means if you stop exactly in the middle between happiness and unhappiness, between sadness and joy, if you can stop EXACTLY in the middle, then there will be neither joy nor sadness, there will be neither happiness nor unhappiness, neither pain nor pleasure. And in the EXACT middle, the transcendence happens: you are just a watcher, a witness.

That witnessing is the goal here. I would like all of my sannyasins to become witnesses. Witness everything, and don't get identified with anything -- even beautiful things, tremendously joyous things. Keep aloof, keep a distance; don't lose yourself in them. Let them come and go. Everything that comes goes, everything that is born dies, but you remain -- you as a witness always remain.

Once you have found that eternal witness in vou. you have found God. God is not an object, but your pure subjectivity.

Pythagoras

VOL. 2, PHILOSOPHIA PERENNIS

Chapter-7

A Bold Experiment