Experiencing Hell

An Asian master was asked, “What do you do when you 

experience hell? and he said, “I try to remain there.”

 

    The experience of hell is caused by resistance.  No matter how difficult, painful and traumatic an experience is, it will wash over us and transform us if we experience it fully without resistance.  When we resist an experience, we can prolong our “hell” indefinitely.

    My experience of “hell” began in college.  After spending a year in Jerusalem studying western mysticism, I felt called to become an Episcopal priest.  I couldn’t handle working with 2 people dying of cancer in hospice, so I focused upon a second career choice — becoming a psychologist.  After working with adolescents at Charter Grove Psychiatric hospital, I felt like I should check myself in rather than volunteer there.  I couldn’t handle listening to their problems, and I worried about them constantly.  

    When I graduated with a degree in world religions from UC Riverside, I took a solitary, all night job at American Express copying documents onto microfilm.  Working a graveyard shift by myself was brutal.  Spending so much time alone magnified my mental illness.  I felt like I failed in my calling to become a priest or a psychologist.  I felt completely worthless.  I felt abandoned by God (and Mom).  Rage burned inside me, and I tore up cardboard boxes and stuck my fist through the wall.  After a year, I was laid off, and then I went back to school, and I taught elementary school for 30 years.

    My year at American Express was hellish because I was unable and unwilling to feel completely worthless.  Instead of feeling my pain, I developed an enormous ego.  I imagined that I was more spiritually advanced than anyone that I knew.  My false pride masked the pain of feeling worthless that I was unable to face.

    Many years later, after a third session of meditating 3 & 4 hours a day for 3 months, I finally faced my feelings of worthlessness that were deeply buried.  I took an entire bottle of Zantac every day trying to avoid digesting my own stomach, but then the release came.  I was released from hell.  

    I was willing to do anything to be released from the hell of my own creation.  I never would have meditated intensively if I had lived a happy life.  Intensive meditation led to a kundalini awakening that transformed my life forever.  My mental illness was one of my life’s greatest blessings.

    Hell is only hell because of resistance.  Without resistance, there is no hell.