Acharya Prashant: Hell is a place where you get a lot of sympathy, consolation, condolence, and commiseration. You're told that we agree that you are in a miserable state. Your neighbor comes to you, puts his hand on your shoulder, and with a grave face tells you that you are indeed in deep trouble. That's hell. What has been done? Your belief in your problemed existence has been deepened. Your problem is not that you have problems. Your problem is that you think you are the one who can have problems and these two are very different things. Very different things.
It is one thing to have problems. It is another thing to mistake your identity so much that you start imagining yourself as being problemed. In hell, your belief in your problemed identity is reinforced. Hell is full of people ready to offer you a shoulder to sob on. You go to someone and tell him “You know, I am so weak and I am a victim of circumstances. And I am ignorant and sick. Luckless and weightless.” And the other fellow would be very quick to not only accept what you are saying but actually return to you, reflect back to you, and exaggerate your version of what you are saying. You tell him “I am feverish; I have 101.” He will put his palm on your face and say, “No! you have 103.” That’s hell. The fact is you’re 98.4. Are you getting it?
Heaven is where your problems are not solved. Heaven is where your problems are dismissed. To solve a problem is to honor a problem. Heaven is a place where problems are not admitted. Hell is the place where you are not admitted if you don’t have problems.
So, heaven is the company of people who will not pay attention to what you have because all that you have is problems. Heaven is the company of people who will pay attention to what you are because when you pay attention to what you are then you have very little respect left for what you have. And the more attention you pay to what you have the easier it becomes for you to turn oblivious to what you are.
Hell focuses on what you have. Heaven reminds you of what you are and once you clearly remember who you are then you don’t even need heaven. Then what you have is ‘liberation’.
These are three ways of living you know. The most common way of living is, "What do I have?" 990 of 1000 people live constantly worrying and wondering what do I have, how much do I have, how long will it last, and how can I have more. Then some 9 people, maybe, they bother to look at what they are. “What is the quality of my mind, thought, consciousness, life?” Quality is not measured through possessions, because all possessions are ultimately sources of problems. Either they are explicitly problems or they are problems waiting to manifest. They are lyingly latent, dormant.
I am not so much concerned about what I have, the more concern I pay to what I have the more I am empowering my problems. I am rather much more concerned about what I am.
And if you pay sufficient and honest attention to who you are then you are liberated of even the need to ask who you are. That’s the fruit of constantly enquiring and wondering about your fundamental existence.
You could either worry about all the miscellaneous things that most people do or you could keep aside all the miscellaneous worries and focus your mind on this one question or concern or worry which is “How I am doing? What’s the quality of my existence? Who am I to be worrying so much?”
Needless to say, all three are meaningful only with respect to one’s mortal existence: ‘Hell, heaven, and liberation’. None of these relate to any kind of afterlife or place that one reaches after death.
Hell is a way of living; heaven is another way of living and liberation is royal life itself.
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