Hell is the here and now. So is heaven. Quit worrying about hell or dreaming about heaven, as they are both present in this very moment. Every time we fall in Love, we ascend to heaven. Every time we hate, envy or fight someone, we tumble straight into the fires of hell. Is there a worse hell than the torment a man suffers when he knows deep down in his conscience that he has done something awfully wrong? Ask that man. He will tell you what hell is. Is there a better paradise than the bliss that descends upon a man at those rare moments in life, when the bolts of the universe fly open and he feels in possession of all the secrets of eternity and united with God? Ask that man. He will tell you what heaven is.
Whatever we experience is in the present moment. Heaven and hell are metaphors for the experience of opposite states in a given moment. Subjectively, the feeling gives us the measuring stick – do we feel well or not. We can name a state of severe suffering hell, and a great feeling of bliss heaven. Inbetween these states we know a lot of variations and graduations of our moods.
The quote mainly relates to the level of morality: “As in heaven” we are when we communicate in a loving way to others (e.g. when we sing together in a choir), and in hell, when we cut ourselves off from someone. An old story fits into that which says that there is no difference between heaven and hell. In both, people are sitting opposite to each other with a table in the middle full of delicious food. All just have chopsticks, which are too long to feed oneself. In hell, people desperately try to manoeuvre the nutrients to their mouth and fail over and over again, cursing and screaming in anger and frustration. In heaven, people serve the person opposite, and all are happy. Hell is self relating, heaven is being there with others in a loving way, this is what this parable says.
For a long time, humanity was kept in ban by the help of the belief about physical places for heaven and hell. Hell was meant to be somewhere in the blue of our atmosphere, and that is where we all want to go; hell is somewhere underneath, and this is what we have to avoid by any means. These directions serve as instruments for social control and hierarchical power administration and people are meant to subordinate. The fear of hellish punishment and the hope for heavenly pleasures was used for steering people’s behaviour. In the beginning, these images were indoctrinated by preaching and altar paintings. Later, the institutionalised religions cared about internalising the control of behaviour in the inside with the help of conscience. With each act, one should be aware whether it is booked to the heavenly or the hellish account.
The hierarchical installation of this order of society was safeguarding itself with the help of heaven and hell against the upper sphere and against the lower sphere – on the upper side there is glory which gave justification to the prevailing governance, on the low side the most terrible things were waiting for those who would not adjust to the rigid rules. So everyone had to stick to the narrow roles which had been prescribed, and the risk of downfall was lingering everywhere while the hopes for rise were postponed towards the end of life.
It was the materialistic consciousness, which turned its back on these mechanisms of social steering by subtly and cynically undermining it with its orientation towards winning happiness on earth by heaping up material goods. Take care of enjoying your mundane life up to a maximum and do not give a dime for the fate of others.
Then came the age of enlightenment and with it personalistic consciousness. It proclaimed the end of fairy tales about places of anguish somewhere below ground. The earth contains fiery lava but no devils, which enjoy living there. And the sky was scoured by the telescopes of astronomers without finding any paradisiacal realms there.
So the view was redirected into the experiencing subject, the person who takes world of her feelings and emotions and their dynamics seriously and importantly. Good phases change with bad ones, it is a restless life dependent of moods. The personalistic consciousness looks for the heaven inside, but all promises for happiness are just fruitless and temporary consolations. At first, all the depths and in-depths of the life of the soul have to be explored and encountered. This search easily arrives at places similar to hell. Then, at some place, it becomes clear that one’s own inside world well never grant ultimate certainty about the destination of human life.
The consciousness grows further and opens on the systemic level for the relationships with others. They become more meaningful than one’s own search of the truth. How can I be content, when the world is in jeopardy? How can I enjoy my steak when I know that the rain forests of the Amazon region were cut down for it? How can I buy a cheap T-shirt when I can be sure that it was sewed by children? A lot of questions, which disturb our self certainty and self relatedness.
When we approach holistic consciousness, we realize that we can find heaven inside of us but not in our personal inside but in an inner realm which does not belong to us but which is fuelled by a power of love which is far bigger than we are. Then it becomes easier for us to place all our actions into the service of this power of love and by this we enlarge the areas in our life in which heaven shines through.
The rules are taken from Elif Shafak's novel “The Forty Rules of Love” (Viking 2010). They are inspired by the Sufi tradition and worded by the autor's imagination. www.elifshafak.com
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