Post #56: Heaven and Hell

21 August 2023

“Of course you may be too much of a fool to go wrong—too dull even to know you are being assaulted by the powers of darkness. Or you may be such a thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights and sounds. But most of us are neither one nor the other. The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, with smells, too, by Jove!—and not be contaminated.”

—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Heaven and hell have commonly been depicted as physical destinations for reward and punishment after death. The highly elaborated account of such places that a curious student might discover in the Buddhist cosmology too may seem, at first glance, to conform to this traditional model—except that the gradations are particularly nuanced, the emphasis is not on judgment of souls but on plain cause and effect, and the realms are understood as outward reflections of corresponding mental states, not physical locations as we normally understand them—though I must admit that I am quite puzzled by the relationship between mind and matter these days, not only on Buddhist terms but quite generally.*

The very idea of places that do not fall within our ordinary human dimensions confuses me, and I know nothing at all of posthumous destinations (if anyone does). Meanwhile our human, all-too human schemes of reward and punishment give me enough headaches without my trying to determine what they might look like from a higher vantage point. What I can say though, if only by way of contemplation and speculation, is that certain mental states really do seem to give one access to distinct worlds of experience—heavens and hells, if you will. To what extent my impressions match the Buddhist accounts, I cannot be sure since I am not confident that I understand them well enough; but the two seem to point in a similar direction, at least.

Rebirth is not something that I am keen on speculating about, as I’ve said before (see Posts #1, #4, and especially #48), but it is nonetheless quite intuitive to me that one might visit a heaven or hell-realm for a spell without having to be reborn there. It is hardly a secret in seeking circles that intense meditation can take one to otherworldly heights, and that it can also, in certain cases, cast one down to outlandish depths (for minutes or hours by the clock, perhaps, but felt eternities because time passes with excruciating slowness in those dreary regions)—usually as a result of second-guessing one’s meditation teachers and disregarding or even inverting their instructions on certain crucial points. (I would rather not get more specific, lest I create an incentive of the reverse psychological kind; nor would I dream, for my own safety’s sake, of going against the urgent advice of the most seasoned meditators in this manner. But I have met brothers on the Path who could not keep their hands off the matches and ended up in fiery pits much beyond what they had bargained for. The intimate nature of their confessions, between fellow travelers on the Path, leaves me not at all disposed to doubt them.)

Reports of near-death experiences suggest that the mental laws of gravity may also get suspended for the dying, and that they too might be admitted for a while to other worlds, though since such accounts are brought to us, by definition, from parts that still allow for returns, they look inconclusive to me so far as what lies beyond is concerned. The way I think of these uncharted mental territories—what Huxley called “the antipodes of the mind” in his 1956 essay on Heaven and Hell**—is on analogy with the visible spectrum of light, bounded at its respective ends by the infrared and ultraviolet ranges that the naked eye cannot discern, but that can be brought into view by various contrivances.

Alternatively, I imagine a kind of mental radio that is preset to certain channels but quite capable of picking up signals at other, normally hidden wavelengths, when the mind is, by accident or design, deflected from its more ordinary modes of operation. (Huxley argued that the brain receives a vast number of broadcasts at unacknowledged frequencies all the time, but that only a tiny trickle is allowed to pass through the filter as sufficiently relevant for survival to merit conscious reception.) Whatever comes through on these channels will get heard a little differently by everyone, depending on the configuration of the receiver; but the frequencies themselves are quite real, not merely imagined, even if the imagination will color how they are visualized.

     What put me in mind of all this was my last post on Love, together with some further reflections that I shared afterwards with a friend. Both like and unlike Huxley, I have opened a few doors of perception leading me to see the heavenly realms as explorable domains of love and goodness and purity, with equivalent hellish ones defined first and foremost by the absence of affection and connection, and the dread, desolation, and despair that must ensue where the separating and destructive principle alone holds sway. Thus Freud’s Thanatos writ large, one might say, manifesting itself in the darkest hues possible, as against Freud’s Eros taken to the highest levels in the divine abodes of equanimity and love.

     The epistemological issues around questions of inner versus outer realities and their complex interactions elude and confound me, as I’ve said. On the one hand, I cannot place these strange intimations of hidden corners of the mind (or of worlds beyond our own, who knows); on the other hand, these glimpses seems as profound to me as anything to be experienced in the outward dimensions, and I am no longer sure whether the boundaries of the mind can really be set reliably around the limits of a person, as they presumably can around a body, or whether things are not much more mysteriously connected at the mental level than our ordinary frames of reference would allow. In other words, the matter goes altogether above and beyond my powers of comprehension and resolution. All I can say is that when one has seen something of these realms by direct inward experience—here, the unbounded power and beauty of the light, there, the sheer terror and agony of the “darkness visible”—they can come to seem disconcertingly real.

     If we are prepared to posit the existence of dark matter and energy about which we know nothing save that there must be lots of the stuff for our equations to balance, then why should we not also allow for the possibility of alternate planes of existence, shadow-worlds that are equally dark to us, save for the occasional flashes of illumination by which they may, for a moment, appear before the mind’s eye? The evidence, if it can even be called that, is far too subjective, you may say; it has none of the rigor of our scientific equations. Granted. But for all its obvious weaknesses, it also comes with something that your mighty equations lack, namely the persuasive power of intimate personal experience, whether it accords with your criteria of rationality or not. And the long, colorful tradition of similar experiences throughout the ages and cultures of mankind makes me wonder whether they really are so exclusively subjective after all. None of this is more than suggestive, at best, and proves nothing; nor is it likely to change anyone’s mind. But I am not trying to convince anyone of the truth of things, only to share how things look to me—and to dissuade my brothers and sisters in Dukkha, if I can, from tattooing Grim Reapers and other beastly marks on their faces, be it physically or by way of sympathy and flirtation. (Not that a flirt makes anyone a fiend; but it’s still an unhelpful direction to go in.)

     I will go another step further and testify (believe it or not) that in the celestial regions remedial lessons are given in a kind of multi-dimensional HyperPoint format to help dimwitted earthlings see that Love really is, despite all appearances to the contrary, the power that holds everything together. Bah humbug, you may sneer: nothing more than the raving delusions of a befuddled brain. Maybe so. But if it is mere incapacity we have before us, how come it makes such an overpowering impression on reasonably active intelligences, to say nothing of cases like Meister Eckhart and Thomas Aquinas, who were hardly known as fools? How come the vision is more beautiful, edifying, and pacifying than anything normally on display in life; how come, unlike its earthlier equivalents, it creates no craving for more, no ego-inflation, and no calls to dubious action, but only a deep sense of gratitude at having been allowed to behold a marvel at once so sublime and so benign? (Please note that I am quite determined not to give these revelations—or ravings, as the case may be—any high-sounding names or labels. Nor am I personalizing them or connecting them to any explanation of the world or to creedal strictures of any kind. Least of all do I wish to proselytize for them in any way, never even having mentioned them in public before.)

     With all due respect for the formidable intellects and truly clever and often deeply insightful books by Mr Dawkins and Associates, I can do without the horseplay around the Apocalypse—a highbrow example, it seems to me, of the deplorable levity among supposed sophisticates around symbols of evil, something I shall return to in a bit. War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death are not personifications to make light of, let alone to embrace; they are the universal banes of mankind, secular or religious, and if anything, the champions of secularism should dread them even more, as destroying all we’ve got, this one and only life.

     I do not scorn the rational faculty, in this context or in any other. I fully appreciate that the internet runs on relativity theory not voodoo; when I get sick, felled by cardiac arrest, or run over by a diabolical hell-machine (automobile in common diction), I ask without hesitation to be taken to the nearest and best-equipped hospital, not the local witch-doctor, and I entrust myself to the medical profession’s textbooks and scientific algorithms, not the good doctors’ prayers or anyone’s magical incantations. With a broken heart or a broken mind, however, things already look quite different, and altogether so when it comes to a body ravaged beyond repair and on the brink of death. Then I would hand myself over quite gladly to a shaman or a priest, any priest really, in preference to a physician or a physicist, from whom I would not expect to hear anything very germane at the ultimate hour.

     I admire Hume’s towering intelligence and his “experimental method of reasoning,” and I am as averse as he is to theistic dogmas and noisy displays around the divine. (If thou wouldst be holy, do not yelp about God, as Meister Eckhart put it so aptly.) But to invoke Hume’s Treatise is also to acknowledge that he perhaps more than any other thinker demonstrated and illustrated (in the conclusion to Book I, unforgettably) how utterly reason subverts itself when it comes to the crunch; how entangled it gets in its own lines of argument, and how desperately lost in the labyrinths of its own making. The resulting despair afflicts not the dullest but the sharpest minds most acutely and painfully (see #32), and Hume therefore concluded, very reasonably, that the rational faculty neither does nor ought to hold sovereign sway over our affairs, but that it is and should ever be but the servant of our passions, which I take to include a good many intuitions that may look rationally unwarranted. (Thus, more recently, Jonathan Haidt’s understanding of the discursive, calculating mind as the rider on an elephant, or Daniel Kahneman’s predominant “System 1”.)

     The strident unbeliever thinks he is right, and he has his reasons; so do the believers. The unbeliever’s case may be the more rigorous one, but he is stacking the deck without perhaps realizing it when he defines to his advantage what counts as evidence. Even if that were found an entirely legitimate move, there would still be an element of wisdom missing if he could not see the problem with telling others that they are deluded wretches about the most fundamental beliefs they have committed their lives to. Nor is the strident case made any more compelling when the most subtle and impressive believers—take someone like Bonhoeffer if the more traditional catalogue of saints does not convince you—are dismissed as numerically insignificant, as if the typical unbeliever were a latter-day Voltaire, and as if the totalitarian mass movements of the twentieth century had not given us the most bitter examples of irreligious horrors not a whit better than the religious ones, and arguably on a greater scale still.

     We have very grand ideas of ourselves, we Prometheuses of one tiny corner of our galaxy, though I grant that it is deeply impressive what our science has been able to discover about the universe we live in. Still, to think that we know what is really going on looks grotesquely presumptuous to me even when it takes the largely negative form of narrowing the bounds of permissible evidence until, lo and behold, everything appears conveniently reduced to the diminutive dimensions of the human knower and the ideas he is able to form of the world—a game than can be played as readily by secular-scientific as by religious rules. The former may have the upper hand in producing utilitarian results, and I would never scoff at those; but it has not done nearly so well when it comes to beauty and meaning, on which it has regularly proved inferior to even the crudest systems of mythology, without therefore letting its confidence be diminished in the least.

     But enough, and back to my main purpose, which is not to argue with the respective self-assurances of the unbelievers and their religious opposites; they all sound rather too sure of themselves to me, while I am not confident of anything, save the validity, on a level of existence that I do not pretend to understand, of such mystifying glimpses of the unknown as I’ve been privy too. What they signify I dare not say except insofar as they suggest with great urgency, to me at least, the imperative importance of aligning oneself with certain “frequencies” and avoiding others. Close contact with the nether as against the higher regions is equally instructive in this regard, though a lot less soothing. Even a passing familiarity with what it feels like when the minions of Evil come knocking on the other side of the divide, tapping the wall to test it for cracks and other structural weaknesses, should make anyone shrink in horror from the thought of giving them any openings—in the form of ill-considered, self-inflicted marks on one’s body, for instance.

     To me it is deeply disturbing, indeed terrifying, to witness with what insouciance so many of our contemporaries get their bodies permanently engraved with signs and symbols that align with the most unwholesome frequencies possible, often enough pointing straight down into the abyss. Wherever you set the dial on your mental radio, you will get a channel carrying corresponding messages and influences, and you will need to live with their presence “in your head” (as is so often said with derision, as if your world could play itself out anywhere else, whatever may or may not be going on outside).

     The hell-realms and their resident entities (or perhaps better, energies) may not be tangible things that one can easily point to within our ordinary frames of reference, but neither are they mere metaphors; there is real power behind them, in the nature of a deadly undertow, and they are under no circumstances to be toyed or trifled with. Whether you want to call the associated dangers psychological or spiritual does not matter much in the end; either way the very soul is put in jeopardy, along with one’s sanity and life itself.

     Alfred Loos, the turn-of-the-century Viennese artist and architect, most famous for the pioneering modernist building opposite the Hofburg, had some scathing but timely things to say about the fundamental savagery of this art form in his classic essay on “Ornament and Crime” (1908). Topical or not, an aesthetic deprecation of the Loosian sort is not my concern here, nor the questionable medical wisdom of depositing copious amounts of industrial dye permanently under one’s skin. Of these lesser evils, let everyone be his own judge; I see much greater menaces looming.

     As when Persephone descended to the underworld, or when one has to go to prison, so it is imperative in all the dominions of darkness not to accept any “gifts,” however insignificant they may appear—because they belong irrevocably to the other side and they come with indissoluble strings and invisible weights attached. (In Persephone’s case, one bite of a pomegranate was enough to bind her to Hades forever. And she was the boss’s wife, with regular leave and time off for good behavior. Lesser mortals get no such hospitable treatment.)

     Protective devices, such as inscribed prayers or the yantra tattoos favored by Thais in dangerous professions, may still fall under the Loosian injunction; but by the logic outlined above, they might at least be thought to shore up one’s defensive lines at the decisive moment. Not that the body is the crucial thing here; it is the purity of one’s mind that furnishes the real fortifications. But given how few spirits are so reliably bright and unblemished, there are no words for just how bad an idea it is to make ineradicable physical breaches, standing invitations to the darkness, on one’s very body, when we should be devoting all our vigilance and fortitude to keeping the encroachments at bay.

     The ancient human custom whereby well-established rules get suspended for one day a year—whether during the Roman Saturnalia or at a Zen monastery, in the form of Halloween or on the Mexican Day of the Dead—may have something to recommend it, psychologically speaking. I would not deprive the kids of a chance to go trick-or-treating dressed up as ghouls and goblins (if there are any left: princesses, unicorns, and Elmo, I would ban without mercy). To open the gates once every 365 days under supervision (the police and hospital admissions records for the night speak loudly enough) and in the context of a limiting tradition (or what remains of it) is a proposition very different from keeping them ajar all year round, and all life long, as with a permanent tattoo.

     “Silly old superstitions,” the insouciant will scoff: nothing but mental cobwebs from the benighted past and therefore either harmless or even good to play with, as demonstrating the groundlessness of the traditional fears and cautions. I am under no illusions about making my contrary impression plausible to the unpersuaded, but perhaps the following explanation might help to illustrate it a little better. We can agree, presumably, on colors vibrating to different frequencies that can affect us quite noticeably—if you think of bright red, for example, or black. (It is no coincidence that these two are the colors of choice for depictions of the demonic, nor that black is not technically a color at all but the voracious void.) The images that worry me do something comparable: they vibrate at an unwholesome frequency, as it were, and not only that, they also resonate with the viewer, whether he is aware of it or not.

     Even in everyday terms we speak of the “bad vibe” we get from some things; it isn’t very hard to detect in many cases, even by the scoffers. They just don’t see how there might be something serious behind mere iconography, any pernicious connection that we ought not to be making. I expect that such images are fun to display, in part, because they do still have the power to shock occasionally, or at least to make others uncomfortable. Such provocations do not strike me as especially salutary, but what is even worse is that the flashers may be willfully stirring up and reinforcing something unhealthy within themselves—the irresistible titillation, for some, of playing not only with the forbidden but with fire itself.

     Alas, none of this tends to get taken very seriously by modern sophisticates. It passes, instead, for a joke at the expense of the gullible, a fashionable sneer at convention, a laughing-off of something whose real dimensions are of no particular concern to the merry-makers. For a very few others it may be more than that, a real act of defiance in one direction, fealty and idolatrous devotion in the other; they too may not fully understand what they are getting into, but they should at least have an inkling of what they are doing. They are deliberately asking for trouble, so there is not much to be done for them, save prayers of dubious efficacy that someone or something may deflect them from their self-destructive course, or have mercy on their lost souls against the odds. The realms they are putting themselves in touch with are not known for their merciful ways.

     The idea of angels and demons walking the earth in human form, or of sinners being confined permanently to hell by way of punishment for their misdeeds, still look like childish conceptions to me, though I may be wrong about that too. What I am concerned with is “going to hell” here and now, in this life, by bringing altogether the wrong influences into it, mental contaminants as it were. We care about micro-pollutants in other contexts almost to the point of hysteria, yet we seem completely oblivious to anything that is not material and cannot be readily gauged, but operates at more subtle mental levels that are not therefore any less real. I am no expert in these kinds of poisonings, and I have no idea what doses are required for coming to serious harm. It probably depends on the person and his reserves of goodness, what one might call his spiritual immune system. What I am urging is that however strong one may deem oneself, it is plainly and patently unwise to mess around with noxious materials whose hazards one does not understand, on the naive assumption that they are harmless because one is not struck by lightning when one toys with them. I do not properly understand the risks either; but laughing at such things looks as unsalutary and ill-advised to me as playing with radioactive materials and jeering at the unease of others because nothing worrisome seems to be happening.

     But enough, and back to my starting point, which is not some presumed missionary calling to save others from the errors and horrors of their ways, but merely the dread induced by personal experience of what such unwholesome and pernicious frequencies feel like when they are amplified or enlarged to the point of filling a whole mental realm—as one can witness when the brain gets attuned exclusively to the corresponding wavelengths under certain influences. It is a most alarming, haunting, unanswerable thing to be shown. Imagine being trapped in a space with nothing but screeching sounds, nails scratching on blackboards; how long before your mind would crack and break?

     The life and death of Avicii, the late techno DJ to whom I devoted #4, holds some particularly doleful lessons in this respect. Just what possessed him to name himself after the deepest and darkest of the Buddhist hells? It was not cute, clever, or cool; it was precisely the kind of teenage folly and recklessness that so often ends badly. One might even discern the outlines of a classic Faustian bargain: the dark side kept its promise and paid amply in the usual currencies, and a world of success was won, for a while; but then the most merciless of collectors came for repayment, and a soul was lost, forever. Laugh it off or dismiss it as a mere figure of speech, if you must; I am in dead earnest.

     The reason why one raises such somber concerns (as I’ve also heard Jordan Peterson say somewhere***) is not to chastise those who are blazing with agony, or castigate those who have lost their minds or lives to the fires already. One says what one has to say because of not wanting to see anyone else get burned, perhaps for want of hearing the right word at the right time. And when I say “get burned,” I would like to make it crystal-clear that I mean human suffering that inspires compassion, in this world before all else, not morbid visions of spirits consigned to the eternal flames for never-ending torments, and other such spiritual pornography bordering on sadistic voyeurism. I cannot make any sense of these punishments; I can only hope, with all my heart, that the dead are done with such human miseries along with everything else.

     To make an end, at last, of a potentially interminable topic that has given me far more trouble than any of my preceding posts (eight drafts), the Buddhists have been teaching for thousands of years that there are bridges between mind-states and corresponding worlds; maybe they are right. Even if that sounds bizarre to you and you are not disposed to believe in devils and demonic dominions, please give them a wide berth anyway. Likewise, whether or not you believe in angels and celestial realms, or anything else of the sort, do not disparage them but keep a friendly distance at least. Doing so may help you whether they exist or not.

*I have tried in the past to make sense of the Kantian and Schopenhauerian philosophies, but with very limited success, I am afraid. What little I am able take away from them, however, is that our notions of space and time and causal relationship, however true for us in ordinary experience, cannot be taken for the nature of things in themselves.

** Thus the opening of Heaven and Hell: “Like the earth of a hundred years ago, our mind still has its darkest Africas, its unmapped Borneos and Amazonian basins… The creatures inhabiting these remoter regions of the mind are exceedingly improbable. Nevertheless they exist… A man consists of what I may call an Old World of personal consciousness and, beyond a dividing sea, a series of New Words—the not too distant Virginias and Carolinas of the personal subconscious and the vegetative soul; the Far West of the collective unconscious, with its flora of symbols, its tribes of aboriginal archetypes; and, across another, vaster ocean, at the antipodes of everyday consciousness, the world of visionary experience.”

*** Plenty of connections could be made between my ideas here and what Peterson has to say in Maps of Meaning. When I wrote my piece, however, I had not read his magnum opus yet, and my familiarity with his online presence was a cursory one, so there can be no question of direct influence.