Dear friends,
Western religion has a notion of hell. I believe it is broadly misunderstood, though – like most broadly accepted ideas – there is a grain of truth in it. I’d like to explore the notion this week and uncover what is actually true.
We unfortunately tend to create our own hells. That is NOT to say that every strongly unpleasant thing that happens to us is some disastrous error on our part. If a ten-year-old boy makes a mistake on a math paper there is nothing to blame him for, nothing for him to be ashamed of, nothing to judge him for, and nothing he ought to hide from himself or others.
We are here to learn. Is there anyone who thinks he has nothing to learn? We want to be better people so imagine that we already are. This leaves us shocked and dismayed when we make an “error” of some sort. But this is, simply put, a denial of reality. It is why it is so easy to see other people’s flaws and so hard to see our own.
Our notion that the pain that comes to us is a punishment is where the notion of hell comes from. When you burn your hand on a hot stove, is the stove “punishing” you? Is the stove angry with you? Is the stove judging you? There are rules of happiness in this world and when we violate them we suffer. This is Nature’s way of directing us to do something different. It’s a good thing hot stoves hurt or we’d be dead by now!
Yogananda told a great story. He was with a Fundamentalist minister who was talking strongly about hell. Yogananda said that he well understood because he himself had a son. He said that his son recently badly misbehaved so Yogananda threw him in an oven and locked the door. The Minister was shocked and outraged! Yogananda pointed out that the minister was saying that’s what God did, and not only that, but for all eternity. Did the minister actually think that God was less kind and compassionate than Yogananda?
When we suffer, if we keep our hearts as open as possible and try to feel what the lesson is, the suffering is tremendously lessened. It is more complex because most often the lessons have been handed down from incarnation to incarnation, so we cannot easily (or at all) see the causality. If our hand didn’t hurt until three days after touching the stove we’d have no idea what was going on. That’s why we need a teaching that explains the physics of this world and of human consciousness. There are teachings, writings, and occasionally individuals that can connect the dots for us so we can learn what we need to learn and, hopefully, avoid our self-created “hells.”
May each of us seek to understand rather than to reject or fear; to show gratitude for what comes to us rather than resentment; to see Spirit’s love behind every test rather than judgment or punishment.
Blessings,
David G., manager
for the Gang at East West