Heaven and Hell 

For me, heaven and hell are not geographical locations, but rather purely internal, experience-based states of mind. I depart from the classical religious notions of punishment and reward in the afterlife.

I explain the distinction between heaven and hell through a simple psychological principle: what you do with absolute willingness becomes your heaven; what you do reluctantly and with internal resistance becomes your hell. When you struggle against reality or perform tasks with aversion, you create your own hell in the here and now.

The traditional idea that a better place awaits us after death is one of the greatest crimes against humanity. This notion prevents people from appreciating life in the present moment. Anyone who has not mastered their own internal foundation would create nothing but chaos and misery, even in the biblical Paradise.

Upon passing, once the physical body is lost, the human spirit loses its faculty of discernment. Consequently, the dominant mental traits a person cultivated during their lifetime become intensely amplified. Those who lived filled with suffering, resentment, and misery experience this state after death with an uncontrollable intensity, what is mythologically described as hell.

Consider the words of Gautama Buddha regarding true inner freedom. When asked why he did not wish to go to heaven, he replied that he would rather go to hell, for people there are suffering, and he could help them. His message is this: if you have organized your inner self in such a way that you are no longer capable of suffering, then even hell loses its terror, and you can pass through it with joy.

People who have turned their own inner lives into a hell are the ones who yearn to reach heaven. People who have created heaven within themselves fare splendidly, wherever the hell they may go.